Future’s Edge by Gareth L. Powell, A Review for #SciFiMonth

OK, I’m glad to be part of SciFi Month again, and I will get to my review of Gareth L. Powell’s Future’s Edge, but I have to say how hard it is to write anything in the wake of the US election. I guess you have to be a US citizen of strong liberal values to grasp the full impact emotionally. After the immediate shocked silence, even grief, of the first reactions, the need to defend and fight for everything I believe in returns today. My compatriots, including many Democrats who just didn’t turn up in expected numbers, have (mis)placed their faith in the orange beast who is slouching back to Washington with an army of true believers crawling all over him. It’s hard to function just now, but I have to force myself to focus on Powell’s new novel. I liked this book, though along the way, I kept thinking I wouldn’t for reasons I’ll explain below.

So, let’s see. In Future’s Edge a scattering of humans have fled Earth, destroyed by a vicious race of beings called Cutters. A few thousand humans and other species, forming a resistance to the invaders called the Commonality, have made it to a hell-hole on the edge of our spiral arm of the galaxy. They desperately wait for the last few ships that can transport them across the great void to the next spiral arm in hope that maybe they can pioneer a new civilization on an unknown planet.

But in this refugee world, humans and other species live in absolute squalor, hoping against hope that they can get passage on one of the too few “foam” ships to escape before the inevitable arrival of the Cutters. Those creatures consist of glass-like extensible blades that tear everyone to pieces, and they love the slaughter. There is no known defense against them. Everyone seems doomed. And yet I would call this a happy, hopeful book. Let me explain.

The narrator for most of the novel, Ursula Morrow, runs a bar in a miserable refugee camp, where she hopes she might meet again her long lost lover, Jack. We learn early on that she is an archeologist who accidentally touched an alien artifact that instilled in her DNA its own essence that has made her practically bullet-proof. She demonstrates this in a painful way to a group of thugs seeking protection money who flee when they see her wound heal by itself. When her ex-lover appears, now in command of a beat-up vessel called Crisis Actor (the term has unfortunate connotations in the US), he tries to convince Ursula to join his crew on a voyage back to the planet where she had her encounter with that alien object. Why? Because, as you can guess, that thing she touched might just hold the key to defeating the Cutters.

When Ursula finds out that Jack, after she’s waited for him for two years, has a new lover, she rejects the whole idea of going back to the scene of her devastating encounter. Furthermore, Jack’s new lover is his ship, in the form of their synthetic embodiment, named Cris, who thinks and acts in entirely human ways, sex included. Ursula just wants to chuck everything and escape on one of the transport ships, but a nearly deadly encounter forces her to change her mind and join Jack’s crew.

I was expecting a lot of fireworks as this triad of lovers worked out their tensions, and there is some of that. But then they have a series of very reasonable, therapeutic talks (two at a time) that straighten things out so they can work together on staving off the existential threat of the Cutters. That seemed a bit too rational (though one of them is, after all, a computer intelligence with a synthetic, feeling body), but their talk is good and wise, and they all have bigger pressures to worry about than fights based on an old love affair. So good writing won me over. We get the story not only from Ursula’s first person narration but also from Chris’s log entries. Those don’t really read like logs but offer a lot of crucial background information – yes, you could call it an info dump but it’s gracefully done and always interesting.

The Cutters are the most brilliant and horrifying creation of the novel. Products of a precursor civilization, they are stirred to action when sentient beings get advanced enough to take to the stars. Then their mission is to wipe them out, in especially grizzly fashion. Unlike the Chenzeme warships of Linda Nagata’s novels that destroy whole planets from space, the Cutters go in for person-to-person massacres. We get close-up encounters with a couple of these glass-like monsters, and those scenes are terrifying. I was also intrigued by the approach to space travel. There is an undervoid dimension of space where space ships can travel faster than light but only if they follow predefined routes called tramlines, also created by a civilization of eons past. It was the discovery of these safe highways that enabled humans and other species to reach other star systems and mingle for the first time.

I won’t say any more about the plot line, except to note in general terms that every time I felt things were resolved without much cost to the characters I still liked reading the story and getting to its interesting end. As I said above, for all the grimness of the setting and terrible destruction the worlds of the Commonality undergo, this winds up being a hopeful book. So, if you set aside preconceptions about the typical climactic bloodbath leading to some sort of victory for the human race and utter destruction of its enemies, then you can enjoy what Powell is doing in Future’s Edge.

[Note this review has been edited since publication to remove a rant of mine about the term ‘crisis actor’ since it was colored by post-election misery (2024) and was a bit unfair to the author of this excellent novel.]

My thanks to Titan Books and NetGalley for an advance review copy of Future’s Edge for this review, which reflects solely my own opinions.