Future’s Edge

The latest offering from Gareth L Powell is a fast-paced space opera with multiple themes. A little background is required to explain what goes on.

The central character of the book is Ursula Morrow, a young archaeology student who is studying the remains of an alien civilization. While on the dig she meets and falls in love with a dashing naval officer called Jack. However, Ursula makes the mistake of putting her bare hand on a piece of alien technology and ends up infected with, well, something.

Leaving hospital on Earth where her infection was being examined, Ursula gets urgent word from Jack to flee the planet as it will soon be under attack. Thanks to Jack’s warning she is able to get on an evacuation vessel and ends up living in a refugee camp. Two years pass, and she hears little of the war against the mysterious aliens called Cutters. All she knows is that Earth has been destroyed and Jack is out on the front lines.

Then Jack turns up. He needs Ursula’s help because the alien technology with which she is infected may be the key to fighting back against the Cutters. Also he is now married. To his starship.

In the book, most of that is background which is related in the first chapter or two. It is a lot. We already have war against an implacable and seemingly unstoppable foe (similar to Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Final Architecture series), archaeology on an alien civilisation that is millions of years old (around 64 million, to be precise, think about what that means in Earth chronology), a human-starship relationship, and the problem of dealing with your ex’s new wife when she happens to be an intelligent war machine with the unlikely name of Crisis Actor (Cris for short).

In his social media posts, Powell has occasionally talked about writing thrillers. It is clear from the opening chapters of Future’s Edge that he’s been practicing the style. The book doesn’t slow down from there. A story that Tchaikovsky might have spent three fat novels over, Powell wraps up in a single, fairly short, stand-alone. It certainly pulls you through the book, but personally I would have liked more space to explore the themes and characters.

And there is more. We get to meet Ursula’s old professor, and her gay best friend, both of whom are still studying the aliens. There’s a whole thing about Ursula’s dead twin, Chloe. There’s the rest of the crew of the Crisis Actor, who make for interesting found family. But blink and the narrative has moved on.

This is possibly a little hypocritical of me, because I don’t have time to read big, fat books. (I still haven’t read part three of The Final Architecture.) But I did finish the book feeling like I wanted to know more about just about everything in it.

Title: Future's Edge
By: Gareth L Powell
Publisher: Titan
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
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