There is something slyly metaphysical in the ambition of Ed Adams’s The Watcher, the fifth novel in what critics are beginning to call the Residuals Cycle—a sequence of books that blend speculative fiction with moral philosophy, political satire, and something else harder to define: a poetics of recursion. To read Adams is to feel the pull of systems—narrative, theological, digital—and to sense the moment they begin to fail, or perhaps evolve.
Like its predecessors (Pearl, Tyrant, Numbers for God, Residuals), The Watcher is built from fragments: dossier entries, oblique conversations, shifting identities. But where Tyrant staged the grotesque theatre of authoritarian spectacle, and Numbers for Godoffered a haunted workplace theology for the cloud age, The Watcher bends outward and backward. It proposes not a new story, but a new medium: memory, encrypted in biology, diffused through filaments.
The central conceit—if such a term doesn’t diminish it—is that knowledge is being seeded into Earth via jellyfish-like entities. Not metaphorical ones. Invisible engineered organisms, modelled on cnidarians, delivering “shards” of magnetomic data into receptive human minds. The idea is strange, even absurd. And yet in Adams’s hands, it feels not only plausible, but inevitable. If Borges had read Sebald and coded in Python, he might have dreamt up something similar.
What grounds The Watcher is not the novelty of its concepts, but the clarity of its affect. These are emotionally intelligent books. The Watchers—Farallon, Limantour, Tomales, Drake—are not omnipotent gods, but compromised actors. They know they are too late. They move in hindsight. The tone, always, is elegiac. The knowledge they disperse may save the planet, or not. There is no utopia waiting.
Adams resists every temptation toward conventional resolution. Instead, he offers a literary strategy more akin to Pynchon’s Against the Day or DeLillo’s Zero K: alternate metaphysics rendered in lucid, affective prose. His characters operate within and against systems they cannot wholly decode. They deliver knowledge shards, redirect timelines, and bear the consequences of unseen decisions. We are in territory shaped by Bergson and Benjamin as much as Ballard and Gibson.
But unlike some of his predecessors, Adams allows his readers moments of warmth, even humour. Limantour’s skateboard. A fish place in Santa Barbara. Glyph-laced leggings. These are not throwaway details. They are precisely what anchors the cosmic. As Rachel Kushner once wrote, “When the structure is radical, the gestures must be human.” The Watcher lives by this principle.
This part-written preview novel ends not with apocalypse, but with a loaded pause. Filaments trailing through time. A correction rather than a revolution. The implication, barely whispered, is that what has happened has happened again—and will happen again.
To read The Watcher is to become aware of your own absorption. To wonder if you, too, have been touched by something filamentary. To suspect that memory itself might be the medium of transmission.
And if that sounds too abstract, too airy—consider this: The Watcher may be the most intellectually audacious, emotionally intelligent science fiction novel of the decade. If there is a sixth book, it is already forming. Somewhere, in the signal.
—Eleanor Hart
Visiting Fellow in Comparative Literature, New College, Westminster.
