Future’s Edge by Gareth L Powell

I would like to thank Titan for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher - Titan

Published - 25/6

Price - £9.99 paperback £7.99 ebook

When archaeologist Ursula Morrow accidentally infects herself with an alien parasite, she fears she may have jeopardised her career. However, her concerns become irrelevant when Earth is destroyed, billions die, and suddenly no one needs archaeologists anymore…

Two years later, she’s plucked from a refugee camp on a backwater world and tasked with retrieving the artifact that infected her, as it just might hold the key to humanity’s survival. With time running short, and the planet housing the weapon now situated in hostile territory, she realises she’s going to have to commit an act of desperate piracy if she’s going to achieve her objective before the enemy’s final onslaught.

The Earth getting destroyed is a constant from Hitchhiker’s Guide to very recently Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Final Architecture series and in these kind of stories it’s not the end of the stories but the beginning. What is humanity without a planet? Do we get better or stay the same when we have no home. Does that perhaps remind us how we tend to think of those without a home? It’s a really interesting concept and Gareth L Powell plays with it again in Future’s Edge a new science fiction novel that is trying in a single story to do a lot and for me while entertaining also feels unusually like we could have enjoyed many more books in this world.

Ursula Morrow is running a bar on a refugee camp many light years from the destroyed Earth she called home once. Two years since she escaped one of a few hundred million humans from a savage merciless race known as the Cutters who are systematically destroying planets across the galaxy and no one can stop them. Ursula was once an archaeologist but that career has no purpose any more and she also accidentally received an alien parasite on a dig giving her immense healing powers. She dreams of her ticket out of there but instead is finding her ex husband has found her and thinks she may be the secret they need to finally fight back. A much bigger adventure awaits.

If you fancy a high speed space-faring adventure bouncing through the end days of Earth and a desperate fight for survival with added gangsters and aliens to meet along the way you’ll have fun with with. Powell is always an incredibly inventive author and this story is more aligned to big alien mysteries where secret technology, ancient secrets and a gang of plucky humans have to race across space to try and stop things. Big adventures and fast paced action arrive. Friendly robots, sentient AI ships, ancient secrets and very alien aliens await. That is always fun to delve into!

My issue though is I selfishly felt I needed a lot more. This story is a standalone and we have the destruction of humanity, Ursula’s own mystery and on top of that a giant fight back. We bounce around past and present in the character’s lives and for me it felt very much skimmed through with a focus more on infodumping explanations for why we have AI ships, galactic hyper space paths and it’s a little too frenetic for my tastes. For me the constant movement feels like very little room for characters to breathe and make an impact, when one key character dies I found I struggled to see the impact they made on the characters based on the incredibly brief page time they got. There are huge big SF themes that could be dialled into and this for me unusually needed more pages to explore without slowing down the story. It’s almost like a duology or trilogy trimmed to one single tale but without enough cut from the major tale. For me while fun I felt it could have had a lot more to tempt us with.

I always enjoy a Powell novel and can see a lot to enjoy here but this story for me feels a little overloaded of the size that it is and ideally I’d had loved a sequel or two to really make this story tell us a bigger epic tale. Others though may appreciate the condensed format will work for them.