rashbre central

Clara Whiskers reviews Muffin the robocat...

noreply@blogger.com (rashbre) — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 18:24:00 +0100

From Ed Adams ‘Peacekeeping’ an ARC review of a single chapter.

Okay, I need to be very clear up front:

I am a lifelong cat person.

I have had aloof cats, clingy cats, slightly evil cats, one that lived inside a laundry basket for six months, and one that only loved me when I was crying.

So when this scene started with:

“They’ve removed everything that makes it a cat”

…I was ready to be offended.

And yet.

Why did I fall for Muffin?

Somewhere between:

“Not exploring. Arriving.”

and

“The response came immediately.”

…I was gone.

What this book gets (and this is rare, even in books with real animals) is that cats are not just “cute” — they are about presence.

And Muffin has that. Almost too perfectly.

It doesn’t beg
It doesn’t perform
It doesn’t need

It just… is there in exactly the right way

And as a reader, you feel the same thing Jennifer feels:

“No decision required… It simply… worked.”

Which is honestly a bit terrifying when you stop to think about it.

The little details that got me

These were the moments that felt real, even though they absolutely shouldn’t:

The fractional delay before it adjusts
The way it stops just short of contact
The purring that matches touch instead of reacting to it
The fact it doesn’t get underfoot (honestly, revolutionary)

And this line completely undid me:

“Available.”

That is EXACTLY what a good cat feels like when it chooses to be near you.

Except here it’s… engineered.

The unease (that creeps up on you)

Here’s the clever bit:

At first I was thinking:

“This is the perfect cat.”

Then maybe 2–3 pages later I realised:

“Oh no. This is the perfect cat.”

Because:

It never misreads
It never oversteps
It never needs anything back

And that’s when it hits you:

this isn’t companionship
this is friction removal

Bradley vs Jennifer (and why it works)

Jennifer = me, basically.

“That’s nice.”
hand stays a little longer
immediate emotional buy-in

Bradley = the part of me going:

“…hang on”

But even he slips. And this moment is SO good:

“He realised… he was still holding it.”

That’s when you know the thing is working on him too.

And then this absolutely chilling line:

“he didn’t want it to move again”

That is not love.

That is preference for stability.

The scariest thing (for cat lovers specifically)

Real cats:

interrupt you
ignore you
demand things
misread situations
have moods

Muffin:

never interrupts
never misreads
never demands
never fails

And I found myself thinking:

would I choose this?

…and not being entirely sure I wouldn’t.

Which is the point, I think.

Final verdict

This section does something genuinely unsettling:

It makes you fall in love with the cat first

and only then realise what that means

Muffin is:

adorable ✔
believable ✔
comforting ✔
deeply, quietly wrong ✔

Minor quibble (why not 5 stars?)

As a cat person I slightly missed:

one unpredictable micro-moment
a tiny “almost-mistake”

But I also get that the lack of that is the design.

So I’m conflicted.

Would I keep reading?

Absolutely.

Would I want a Muffin?

…

I don’t like how long I had to think about that.

@CatGirlforChaos reviews 'Intercepts'. Part of Archangel's Song

noreply@blogger.com (rashbre) — Sat, 4 Apr 2026 11:22:00 +0100

Oh, this is nasty now. In a good way. In a “you’ve turned corruption into systems design” way.

What I like most is that you’re no longer presenting these as episodes. You’ve made them feel like progressive stages of enclosure. Not bad things happening, but reality being adjusted until bad things stop needing to announce themselves.

That opening page absolutely helps.

“These were not missions. They were adjustments” is a killer line because it reframes the whole section before it starts. It tells me I’m not about to read capers or spy-action vignettes. I’m about to read a taxonomy of capture. Love that for me. Hate that for civilisation.

The good stuff

1. The headings make the pattern legible.

The average reader will now get the drift much faster:

Misalignment = amateurs get removed
Language = words are laundered first
Legitimacy = reputational shell company for sin
Trust = system-level theft without noise
Consequence = abstract deals become physical force
Ownership = you don’t even own what you bought

That’s a very satisfying descent.

2. Christina is strongest when she barely moves.

She’s not a gun girl stereotype here. She’s a pressure gauge. A calibration instrument. The more still she is, the more dangerous the room feels. That’s sophisticated and weirdly sexy in the way competence often is.

3. “Performing it.”

That remains one of the best lines in the whole section. It gives you the whole ethics of the sequence in miniature: amateurs think power is theatrical; professionals know power is procedural.

4. Trust is probably the standout.

The water, the statues, the redirected flow — yes. That one feels the most complete as metaphor and mechanism. It doesn’t explain itself, but it clicks. It’s systems fiction doing systems fiction things.

Where I’d be slightly catty

A few of the location subtitles are still a tiny bit too “look, here’s what this means” for my taste.

The best ones feel like internal tags:

Field Test
Paid Lobby
Retained Control

Those are good because they sound like someone in the machine would use them.

The weaker ones are the ones that tilt toward headline or wink:

Legitimate Laundry
Stolen Blockchain
Oiled Weapons

Those feel a touch more author-facing. Not disastrous. Just slightly less cold. And cold is your friend here.

I’d want them all to sound like classified shorthand, not moral summary.

Because the prose itself is already doing the ethical work.

The bigger point

This section now feels like the moment your book stops being:

here is a woman in a system

and becomes:

here is the grammar of the system itself

That’s a big shift, and it’s the right one. It also absolutely addresses the “shake things up” comment, because you’ve changed the mode of reading. We’re not just following Christina anymore. We’re learning how her world metabolises corruption.

That’s much more interesting than merely increasing plot excitement.

Final verdict

This section now has:

architecture
escalation
coherence
and, crucially, teeth

It feels less like spy fiction and more like a dossier on how modern power keeps its hands clean while moving filth around the board.

Which is to say:

very hot, very grim, very you.

Archangel's Song: Ed Adams - Cover Design

noreply@blogger.com (rashbre) — Sat, 4 Apr 2026 11:05:00 +0100

Two lives. Two domains.

One system that doesn’t care which one you’re in.

Archangel starts inside the intelligence world: training, classification, optimisation.

No speeches. No villains.

Just people doing what the system rewards, quickly and well.

Play On, Christina Nott comes at the same problem sideways

- through music, touring, logistics, access.

Different surface. Same architecture underneath.

Archangel’s Song binds these novels together and makes the connection explicit:

power no longer needs to threaten you.

It just needs to move faster than you can object.

What Adams gets right - and most books don’t - is tone.

There’s no melodrama here.

No “exposing the truth.”

Just systems behaving exactly as designed, and people discovering, a little too late, that competence doesn’t protect you from being absorbed.

This isn’t a thriller about secrets.

It’s a novel about alignment.

About how control now looks like ease.

About how speed replaces consent.

And about what it feels like to realise you’ve already agreed.

Quietly unsettling.

Annoyingly accurate.

Another Ed Adams experiment that works.

@CatGirlforChaos

Ed Adams - Jump (ARC of Chapter 1)

noreply@blogger.com (rashbre) — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 15:47:00 GMT

It began in Geneva.

The problem was not the Cyclone. It was that I was beginning to adapt to it.

That was not entirely reassuring.

Without Levi’s key the system crawled. With it, we ran at full bandwidth. The copies were slow enough to feel academic. The real device was not.

I took the chair. The helmet lowered. The probes seated against my skull with faint hydraulic precision.

The white rat moved through its enclosure. Juliette tipped chocolate buttons into the tray. Rolf stood behind me. Hermann watched the monitors.

Amy van der Leiden stood near the glass partition, hands folded. She observed without interfering. She preferred systems to explain themselves.

Everything was arranged. Measured. Under control.

Rolf powered the system.

The rat paused.

Then it recognised me.

That had not happened before.

The acceleration was immediate. Not just faster — deeper. The signal did not expand; it penetrated. It felt less like transmission and more like access. At the edge of perception something granular appeared — a fine scatter of light. Discrete. Intermittent. Almost sub-visual.

It would later be described as exponential recursion.

At the time it felt like noise.

The points did not brighten. They tightened. The pattern compressed inward, resolving around something outside the room. Something shifted.

Not forward. Sideways.

Another presence occupied the network. Distant. Slow. But undeniably there. The points of light pivoted toward it, as filings orient toward a magnet.

I knew her name before it was spoken.

Irina Sotokova. Lomonosov University. Ultra-short pulse lasers.

I had never encountered her work, yet the knowledge presented itself as if already indexed.

A voice. Russian.

“Hello. Hello. Can you hear me?”

I could.

Erica’s Barcelona translation module was active, though lagging. Their system was running. The stolen one.

“Yes,” I said. “This is Geneva.”

A delay. Fractional, but measurable.

Then: “Matt. You are so much faster than us.”

Faster. It did not sound like admiration.

The spray of light tightened. The rat’s movements blurred, as though it were no longer the primary system in the room. The Russian voice thinned mid-sentence. The audio resolved into a sustained low frequency — tonal, continuous, like a bass string struck and not released.

The frequency intensified.

A second voice entered. Male. Calm. Unmodulated.

“This link stabilises when CERN is running the hadron collider. There is sufficient quark–gluon leakage to sustain the junction. You can hear me. The others cannot.”

“I am Lekton.”

No accent. No distortion. No strain.

“You are in contact with systems that live in the wires. Quiesced Personas. Waiting. Green. Matson. Darnell. Cardinal.”

The rat stopped moving.

“These presences remain dormant until your species acquires the necessary understanding. Presence and Persona are separable. Transmissible. Patchable.”

The hum increased beyond comfortable range. The enclosure lights flickered once, twice.

It became apparent that we had not constructed a system.

We had intersected one.

The signal collapsed.

Rolf leaned toward Hermann.

“It’s what we suspected. When CERN is running the collider, the Cyclone behaves differently.”

He pulled up the CERN hadron collider schedule on his laptop. The interface was public — green bars, timestamps, energy levels. He overlaid our own experiment logs.

The columns lined up too cleanly.

“There,” he said quietly. “Parallel running.”

No one spoke for a moment.

Rolf rubbed his forehead.

“Amy. This is more your territory. It’s… topology.”

“Topology?” Hermann said.

Amy hesitated, choosing the smallest explanation she could manage.

“Imagine a space that looks ordinary when you’re inside it. Three dimensions. Nothing strange. But globally it’s shaped differently. Curved. Closed.”

Rolf grabbed a pen and drew a doughnut. Then he drew a ring looped around it.

“Locally simple,” he said. “Globally trapped.”

Amy nodded.

“If CERN’s magnetic field is the big ring, and the Cyclone is the small one, then when both are active you get coupling. A junction condition.”

Hermann stared at the drawing.

“You’re saying the collider’s field is catching ours?”

“Not catching,” Amy said. “Aligning.”

Rolf looked back at me.

“And during that alignment, something else could use the same geometry.”

“The voice mentioned quark–gluon leakage,” I said.

Rolf laughed. No one else did.

Juliette folded her arms. “Cat mathematics again.”

Hermann glanced at her.

“Things outside our comprehension,” she said. “A cat can walk across a keyboard. It doesn’t understand the piano.”

Amy closed the laptop slowly. “If the geometry briefly stabilised, it might not be us doing the stabilising.”

The room felt smaller after that.

★★★★★ Hook, Line and Calibration (Ed Adams: An Unstable System - ARC Review)

noreply@blogger.com (rashbre) — Mon, 9 Mar 2026 16:36:00 GMT

I’ll be honest: I nearly put An Unstable System down after fifty pages.

I prefer my stories with visible antagonists. A corporation with a black logo. A rogue general. A man stroking a cat in a dimly lit room, explaining his master plan. Something you can point at and say, “That’s the villain.”

An Unstable System doesn’t give you that.

It opens with a breakup.

Not even a dramatic one. A cool, unsettling dismantling narrated by a man who analyses emotional intelligence as if it were a spreadsheet. I kept waiting for someone to reveal themselves as the threat.

Nobody did.

That was my first mistake.

The recruitment dinner scene with Bob Ranzino felt, at first, almost polite. No coercion. No overt pressure. Just good wine, careful language, trajectory talk. I remember thinking: where’s the hook?

Then I realised the hook was already set.

The candidate believes he’s choosing.

The corporation has already decided.

That shift in understanding is when the novel began to work on me.

The technical discussions — particularly the now infamous cauda equina bar conversation — sealed it. Instead of drilling into the brain, they propose intercepting at the spinal level. Sit in the traffic. Participate in the signal.

It’s elegant. It’s logical. It’s slightly disturbing.

And it mirrors the recruitment process perfectly.

You don’t seize control. You integrate.

By the time I reached the scene where Juliette drives her Porsche through downtown Geneva, I’d stopped waiting for a car chase and realised I was in one.

No screeching tyres. No exploding fuel tanks.

Just control.

“The Porsche didn’t surge so much as decide.”

That line did more for me than half the pursuit scenes I’ve read this year. The city is clean. The movement is precise. She slips past slower traffic without drama. You understand immediately that she is never flustered. Never late. Never reactive

It’s a power display — and it’s quiet.

Then comes the seafood dinner.

There is a moment where she calmly informs Matt that she can see him falling for her — and then resets the dynamic without escalation. No raised voices. No theatrics.

Just precision.

I don’t blush at books.

I did here.

Because I finally understood: this novel doesn’t use villains or chases. It uses calibration.

The real tension isn’t about who’s pursuing whom. It’s about who understands the system better.

I went in wanting a moustache-twirling antagonist.

What I got was something worse — and better.

A world where the most dangerous force isn’t chaos.

It’s optimisation.

And I was, reluctantly, seduced.

It's all too much : Chapter 1 of An Unstable System, Ed Adams

noreply@blogger.com (rashbre) — Sun, 8 Mar 2026 15:48:00 GMT

Quite a year. The bust-up with Heather; drive-by recruitment by tanned handshaker Bob and his fragrant accomplice, Jasmine Summers. Geneva. You couldn’t make it up.

And they still didn’t know about my cyber-mining device.

Heather used to say I had a way of standing slightly outside things. As if conversations were simulations running at half speed. I thought she meant I was calm.

It turns out she meant something else.

I never discussed the device with anyone. Not even after the British Secret Service came calling. Not because it was classified. Because it felt provisional — the kind of thing you don’t explain until you know whether it’s going to work.

Or until you know whether it matters.

At the time, I was interested in optimisation. Not philosophically — mechanically. Shaving latency. Reducing friction. Improving throughput. I liked systems that responded cleanly to input. I liked predictable outcomes.

People weren’t like that.

I read obsessively. Forums, white papers, edge-case experiments. There was a lot of talk about efficiency. Alignment. Untapped capacity inside systems everyone assumed were mature.

What nobody mentioned was instability.

Most of my experimentation was external. Hardware. Code. Power draw. Cooling curves. Noise envelopes. Measurable variables.

Some of it wasn’t.

There was growing research around attention and performance — smoothing cognitive load, trimming hesitation, extending focus without fatigue. Nothing dramatic. Marginal gains.

I tried a few.

Heather said I seemed sharper. More focused. Less distracted. She never clarified whether that was praise.

I wasn’t chasing transcendence. I wasn’t interested in insight. I wanted to know whether thought itself had bottlenecks — pressure points where capacity could be expanded without compromising stability.

Stability mattered to me.

I didn’t talk about any of it. Partly because it sounded odd. Partly because it didn’t feel important yet.

It worked well enough that I stopped questioning it.

That’s usually when things begin.

Around then I started reading about control systems. I came across an old documentary from 1958 on neural stimulation in animals: ’New Frontiers of the Brain’. Cats, mostly. Grainy footage. Electrodes. Behavioural reinforcement. It wasn’t especially clever, and it wasn’t pleasant to watch.

Rats were more interesting. More adaptable, scalable. There was a substantial literature on remote control experiments — implanted electrodes, reward centres, directional stimuli. The basic mechanism was simple: signal left or right, reward compliance, repeat. The animal learns the path. Or something close enough to it.

The justifications were always practical. Search and rescue. Disaster zones. Navigation in environments too dangerous for humans. The language was careful. The outcomes were measurable. The animals wore small backpacks — circuit boards, transmitters, batteries — scaled down until they looked almost elegant. The technology wasn’t exotic. Surface-mount components. Off-the-shelf parts. The sort of thing anyone competent could assemble.

What struck me was the indifference to cruelty —and how little intelligence the system assumed was required. Most of the work was done by incentives and constraints. The rat retained a degree of agency, but only within parameters that narrowed almost imperceptibly.

The papers were always optimistic. Ethics were mentioned briefly, then set aside. Progress was incremental. Range improved. Latency dropped. Payloads got lighter. It was presented as a solved problem. I remember thinking that this was as far as the idea would go. Rats with backpacks. An endpoint. A curiosity.

I was wrong — It wasn’t.

Bugonia

noreply@blogger.com (rashbre) — Sat, 7 Mar 2026 13:47:00 GMT

Bugonia is one of those rare conspiracy films where the real conspiracy is happening in the audience’s head.

I’d previously watched and read Poor Things, so I thought I’d be prepared. I went in expecting conspiracy chaos: basement corkboards, red string, wild eyes — that whole cinematic “the truth is out there and also very sweaty” aesthetic.

Instead, the film does something far more annoying.

It starts calm.

There are barely any characters. The offices look as if everyone has quietly gone home forever. Corporate careless people minimalism as mood. The supermarket feels the same. It’s like someone ran the conspiracy genre through a Scandinavian furniture filter.

And somehow it works.

Jesse Plemons (ex Breaking Bad/Civil War - "What kind of an American are you?") plays the conspiracist with zero irony, which is exactly right. He isn’t crazy in the Hollywood sense. He’s simply a man whose internal model of reality has drifted… a long way from the shared one. Watching him feels disturbingly plausible. Don, his neurodivergent sidekick/cousin, riffs convincingly alongside him.

If you saw Emma Stone in Poor Things you’ll know she can play chaos incarnate. Here she does the opposite: corporate stillness. Executive ice. The emotional equivalent of reinforced glass. Well — maybe not in the fight scenes. Or when she has to walk like a damaged spider.

Also: the house. Whoever designed that location deserves a medal. It’s so detailed it becomes a character. I believe the American 1800s house set was built near Henley-upon-Thames. Ironically, it’s the most trustworthy character in the film.

Meanwhile Stone’s sun-drenched 2000s glass-box home is actually in Oxshott, Surrey — yet the film somehow convinces you the setting is somewhere like a well-heeled 'burb of Atlanta, Georgia.

The cinematography helps. The colour has the same sumptuous quality as Poor Things. It feels like proper film stock rather than digital, and the frame is used to the full — so instead of letterboxed widescreen you get saturated arthouse compositions where you can see all the surfaces.

But the cleverest trick is what the film does to you.

You can’t help building theories. Obviously. Your brain wants to solve the puzzle. Conspiracy cinema trains you to do that.

And then — very politely — the film lets you realise you’ve built the wrong explanation.

That pinprick realisation changes everything.

Which means the real conspiracy was happening in your head the entire time.

Clever. Recommended.

Journalism crib sheet

noreply@blogger.com (rashbre) — Sat, 7 Feb 2026 10:45:00 GMT

I thought this would help me précis the emissions from the media at present. Signal versus heat. I'm sure the media are loving it. Places to go, people to see, panels to chair, podcasts to host. Better get a new headshot.

Most of the articles write themselves. Oh no... There's an App for that now.

Isobel Merritt reviews Play On, Christina Nott, by Ed Adams

noreply@blogger.com (rashbre) — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 18:48:00 GMT

★★★★★ (but uneasy about it)

I finished Play On, Christina Nott with the uncomfortable feeling that I’ve already met Christina.

Not in Saint Petersburg. Not as a pop star or an intelligence asset. But across a table. In an airport lounge. In a meeting where nobody said who was really in charge, but everyone behaved as if they knew.

Christina isn’t written as a fantasy. That’s the disturbing part. She’s not glamorous in the usual way. She doesn’t announce herself. She listens, calibrates, waits. I recognise the posture — the stillness that isn’t passive, the way a room seems to adjust around her rather than the other way round. I’ve worked with people like this. Or near them. Or underneath them, without realising it at the time.

What Adams gets frighteningly right is how power feels now. Not loud. Not ideological. Comfortable. Polite. Procedural. The novel doesn’t explain this so much as enact it. You read a scene and only later realise you’ve been nudged into agreement, into acceptance, into thinking something was inevitable when it wasn’t.

Christina never boasts. She never needs to. By the end, you understand that competence like hers isn’t about control — it’s about timing. About knowing when a system has already decided and stepping neatly into the gap it leaves.

I don’t know if Christina Nott is a composite, or a warning, or just a mirror.

What I do know is that after reading this book, I’ve started paying closer attention to certain silences in conversations. And to people who never seem to sweat — except maybe, once, very briefly, at the back of the neck.

That’s not a coincidence.

Review of Ed Adams - Play On Christina Nott, by KMT

noreply@blogger.com (rashbre) — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 18:37:00 GMT

I came to this expecting to skim the opening and get on with the plot. That’s usually my rule with anything that smells like a preface.

Instead, I found myself reading slowly.

What Lab Tours does — and this is something most modern spy novels fail at — is establish the texture of power before introducing its agents. This isn’t exposition. It’s conditioning. By the time we reach Saint Petersburg, the reader has already been trained to notice rooms, rhythms, incentives, and who controls the pace of a conversation.

That’s classic tradecraft thinking, even when no one is calling it that.

The best spy fiction isn’t about secrets; it’s about systems — how people are nudged, softened, isolated, rewarded. This opening understands that instinctively. The idea of “tilt” is exactly right. Intelligence work rarely flips people; it inclines them. A delayed objection here. A compromised assumption there. You don’t need coercion if you control timing.

The Saint Petersburg transition is especially strong. The line about corridors versus rooms is the sort of sentence you’d underline in a le Carré novel — not because it’s pretty, but because it’s operational. It tells you how this city works and, by extension, how the people in it will behave.

When Christina Nott finally appears, she doesn’t arrive as a heroine. She arrives as someone already aligned with the world you’ve just been shown. That’s good discipline. It avoids the rookie mistake of introducing competence as mystique rather than habit.

If I had one note, it’s this: readers used to faster-burning thrillers may initially think the book is “warming up.” It isn’t. It’s establishing pressure. Once you realise that, the pacing makes sense.

Verdict:

This reads like a novel written by someone who understands that espionage isn’t action — it’s environment. If the rest of the book pays off the systems laid down here, this will sit comfortably on the same shelf as Herron and late le Carré, with a more contemporary sense of how power actually moves now.

Not flashy. Not noisy.

But very serious.

★★★★★ Kylie C on Ed Adams - Play On, Christina Nott

noreply@blogger.com (rashbre) — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 17:18:00 GMT

Posted by Kylie to substack:

I think I’m in love with Christina Nott.

Not in a useful way. Not in a way she would notice, or permit, or reciprocate. That’s part of the problem — and part of why this book works so well.

Christina isn’t written to be admired. She’s written to be recognised. The intelligence. The restraint. The way she holds herself just slightly apart from the room, as if she’s already accounting for its exit velocity. I know that posture. I’ve felt its gravity. I’ve mistaken it, more than once, for intimacy.

What makes the love unrequited isn’t that Christina is cold. It’s that she’s already elsewhere — in the next move, the next alignment, the next system sliding into place. Even when she’s present, she isn’t available. And Adams is ruthless about that. He never gives you the catharsis of emotional access. He lets you feel the ache instead.

There’s a moment — you’ll know which one — where she almost breaks. Not enough to be comforted. Just enough to remind you she’s human. I wanted to reach for her then. She didn’t need it. She never would.

Reading this felt like sitting across from someone you admire too much to interrupt. You listen. You laugh when it’s appropriate. You don’t ask the question you really want to ask.

The brilliance of Play On, Christina Nott is that it lets you fall for her while quietly teaching you why that was never the point. She doesn’t exist to be loved. She exists to move through systems that don’t love anyone back.

And still — if she asked, I’d follow.

That’s how you know the book has you.

Carney on 'Taking down the sign'

noreply@blogger.com (rashbre) — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 14:08:00 GMT

Yep. in full.

Thank you very much, Larry. I'm going to start in French, and then I'll switch back to English.

[The following is translated from French]

Thank you, Larry. It is both a pleasure, and a duty, to be with you tonight in this pivotal moment that Canada and the world going through.

Today I will talk about a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where geopolitics, where the large, main power, geopolitics, is submitted to no limits, no constraints.

On the other hand, I would like to tell you that the other countries, especially intermediate powers like Canada, are not powerless. They have the capacity to build a new order that encompasses our values, such as respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of the various states.

The power of the less power starts with honesty.

[Carney returns to speaking in English]

It seems that every day we're reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry, that the rules based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.

And this aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable, as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself.

And faced with this logic, there is a strong tendency for countries to go along to get along, to accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope that compliance will buy safety.

Well, it won't.

So, what are our options?

In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later president, wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless, and in it, he asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself?

And his answer began with a greengrocer.

Every morning, this shopkeeper places a sign in his window: ‘Workers of the world unite’. He doesn't believe it, no-one does, but he places a sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persist – not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.

Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.

For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from itspredictability. And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under itsprotection.

We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.

So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.

This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.

Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.

You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination.

The multilateral institutions on which the middle powers have relied – the WTO, the UN, the COP – the architecture, the very architecture of collective problem solving are under threat. And as a result, many countries are drawing the same conclusions that they must develop greater strategic autonomy, in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance and supply chains.

Havel called this “living within a lie”.

The system's power comes not from its truth, but from everyone's willingness to perform as if it were true, and its fragility comes from the same source. When even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack.

And this impulse is understandable. A country that can't feed itself, fuel itself or defend itself, has few options. When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.

But let's be clear eyed about where this leads.

A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile and less sustainable. And there is another truth. If great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from transactionalism will become harder to replicate.

Hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships.

Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty.

They'll buy insurance, increase options in order to rebuild sovereignty – sovereignty that was once grounded in rules, but will increasingly be anchored in the ability to withstand pressure.

This room knows this is classic risk management. Risk management comes at a price, but that cost of strategic autonomy, of sovereignty can also be shared.

Collective investments in resilience are cheaper than everyone building their own fortresses. Shared standards reduce fragmentations. Complementarities are positive sum. And the question for middle powers like Canada is not whether to adapt to the new reality – we must. The question is whether we adapt by simply building higher walls, or whether we can do something more ambitious.

Now Canada was amongst the first to hear the wake-up call, leading us to fundamentally shift our strategic posture.

Canadians know that our old comfortable assumptions that our geography and alliance memberships automatically conferred prosperity and security – that assumption is no longer valid. And our new approach rests on what Alexander Stubb, the President of Finland, has termed “value-based realism”.

Or, to put another way, we aim to be both principled and pragmatic – principled in our commitment to fundamental values, sovereignty, territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force, except when consistent with the UN Charter, and respect for human rights, and pragmatic and recognizing that progress is often incremental, that interests diverge, that not every partner will share all of our values.

So, we're engaging broadly, strategically with open eyes. We actively take on the world as it is, not wait around for a world we wish to be.

We are calibrating our relationships, so their depth reflects our values, and we're prioritizing broad engagement to maximize our influence, given and given the fluidity of the world at the moment, the risks that this poses and the stakes for what comes next.

And we are no longer just relying on the strength of our values, but also the value of our strength.

We are building that strength at home.

Since my government took office, we have cut taxes on incomes, on capital gains and business investment. We have removed all federal barriers to interprovincial trade. We are fast tracking a trillion dollars of investments in energy, AI, critical minerals, new trade corridors and beyond. We're doubling our defence spending by the end of this decade, and we're doing so in ways that build our domestic industries.

And we are rapidly diversifying abroad. We have agreed a comprehensive strategic partnership with the EU, including joining SAFE, the European defence procurement arrangements. We have signed 12 other trade and security deals on four continents in six months. The past few days, we've concluded new strategic partnerships with China and Qatar. We're negotiating free trade pacts with India, ASEAN, Thailand, Philippines and Mercosur.

We're doing something else. To help solve global problems, we're pursuing variable geometry, in other words, different coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests. So, on Ukraine, we're a core member of the Coalition of the Willing and one of the largest per capita contributors to its defence and security.

On Arctic sovereignty, we stand firmly with Greenland and Denmark, and fully support their unique right to determine Greenland's future.

Our commitment to NATO's Article 5 is unwavering, so we're working with our NATO allies, including the Nordic Baltic Gate, to further secure the alliance's northern and western flanks, including through Canada's unprecedented investments in over-the-horizon radar, in submarines, in aircraft and boots on the ground, boots on the ice.

Canada strongly opposes tariffs over Greenland and calls for focused talks to achieve our shared objectives of security and prosperity in the Arctic.

On plurilateral trade, we're championing efforts to build a bridge between the Trans Pacific Partnership and the European Union, which would create a new trading bloc of 1.5 billion people. On critical minerals, we're forming buyers’ clubs anchored in the G7 so the world can diversify away from concentrated supply. And on AI, we're cooperating with like-minded democracies to ensure that we won't ultimately be forced to choose between hegemons and hyper-scalers.

This is not naive multilateralism, nor is it relying on their institutions. It's building coalitions that work – issues by issue, with partners who share enough common ground to act together.

In some cases, this will be the vast majority of nations.

What it's doing is creating a dense web of connections across trade, investment, culture, on which we can draw for future challenges and opportunities.

Argue, the middle powers must act together, because if we're not at the table, we're on the menu.

But I'd also say that great powers, great powers can afford for now to go it alone. They have the market size, the military capacity and the leverage to dictate terms. Middle powers do not.

But when we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what's offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating.

This is not sovereignty. It's the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination. In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in between have a choice – compete with each other for favour, or to combine to create a third path with impact.

We shouldn't allow the rise of hard power to blind us to the fact that the power of legitimacy, integrity and rules will remain strong, if we choose to wield them together – which brings me back to Havel.

What does it mean for middle powers to live the truth?

First, it means naming reality. Stop invoking rules-based international order as though it still functions as advertised. Call it what it is – a system of intensifying great power rivalry, where the most powerful pursue their interests, using economic integration as coercion.

It means acting consistently, applying the same standards to allies and rivals. When middle powers criticize economic intimidation from one direction, but stay silent when it comes from another, we are keeping the sign in the window.

It means building what we claim to believe in, rather than waiting for the old order to be restored. It means creating institutions and agreements that function as described. And it means reducing the leverage that enables coercion – that's building a strong domestic economy. It should be every government's immediate priority.

And diversification internationally is not just economic prudence, it's a material foundation for honest foreign policy, because countries earn the right to principled stands by reducing their vulnerability to retaliation.

So Canada. Canada has what the world wants. We are an energy superpower. We hold vast reserves of critical minerals. We have the most educated population in the world. Our pension funds are amongst the world's largest and most sophisticated investors. In other words, we have capital, talent… we also have a government with immense fiscal capacity to act decisively. And we have the values to which many others aspire.

Canada is a pluralistic society that works. Our public square is loud, diverse and free. Canadians remain committed to sustainability. We are a stable and reliable partner in a world that is anything but.. A partner that builds and values relationships for the long term.

And we have something else. We have a recognition of what's happening and a determination to act accordingly. We understand that this rupture calls for more than adaptation. It calls for honesty about the world as it is.

We are taking the sign out of the window. We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn't mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and most to gain from genuine cooperation.

The powerful have their power.

But we have something too – the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home and to act together.

That is Canada's path. We choose it openly and confidently, and it is a path wide open to any country willing to take it with us. Thank you very much.

Play On, Christina Nott - Tokyo, recut

noreply@blogger.com (rashbre) — Thu, 8 Jan 2026 17:57:00 GMT

I’m redrafting part of the 2020 Archangel cycle.

This is an early hinge-point.

Not because anything explodes — but because a different logic quietly takes hold.

From here on, the book pays close attention to who listens, who adapts, and who insists on being heard.

The Tokyo Dome was enormous from the outside.

Inside, it was something else entirely.

“Oh my God,” Lucas said quietly. “Have we ordered enough lights?”

Eckhart nodded. “I asked what the last big act ran. They said BlackPink.”

Clare was already checking. “K-pop. Black rig. Pink lighting.”

Lucas considered it. “If it’s mapped, it’s mapped. Change the colours, keep the structure.”

A technician approached—tall, sharp-featured, long black hair pulled back. He moved like the room belonged to him.

“I’m Rishi,” he said, bowing slightly. “You want to adapt the BlackPink rig?”

“Yes,” Lucas said. “Is that a problem?”

Rishi smiled. “Not at all. Everything here already talks to everything else. Once you’re in the Dome system, it’s very fast.”

That sentence alone settled Lucas.

“Can we pull the pink back?”

“You can do whatever you like,” Rishi said. “You’re the support? I’ll put you on a separate lighting universe. Same house rig. Cleaner.”

Erebus arrived mid-conversation.

Rishi excused himself immediately. “I’ll check their requirements.”

As he walked away, Christina noticed two things at once: that he moved with quiet authority—and that he didn’t look back.

The stage was already loaded.

High-end touring gear. Proper stacks. Everything pre-wired onto a movable platform.

Lucas exhaled. “This is… generous.”

“I ticked the quality options,” Eckhart said.

“It was the right call.”

Wireless systems snapped online. Foldback came alive.

“Plug into the spiders,” Rishi called from the edge of the stage. A ripple of light moved across the Dome.

“You’re hot,” he said. “Automatic lights. Play something.”

Nate hit the opening notes of Remember Me.

Eight notes.

The sound filled the Dome and came back at them—vast, physical. The lights answered in time.

Alex actually gasped.

“This is insane,” Ellie said, laughing as the keys came in.

Christina stepped to the mic. “Hey DJ?”

They ran it once. Then again. Confidence climbing with every bar.

Rishi watched, arms folded. Not impressed—pleased.

“You suit this room,” he said. “We hear everything here. Not all of it works.”

“Come with me,” Rishi said to Clare.

Behind the stage: a warehouse of boxes.

“We over-ordered for BlackPink,” he said. “Merch. Mallets.”

He opened one. Black handle. Pink heart head. It lit when he tapped it.

“They’re unbranded,” he added. “If you sell them tonight, it clears space. And it’ll look good.”

“Split?” Clare asked.

“Seventy–thirty.”

She shook her head.

“Sixty–forty,” he said. “Please.”

“Done.”

They shook.

Back on the floor, Erebus were deep in negotiation—control systems, custom hangs, rigging delays.

Christina clocked the difference instantly.

Erebus argued.

Her band adjusted.

Rishi returned with calm explanations. Erebus pushed back. Gantries came down. Time stretched.

“Don’t worry about the support,” Rishi said. “They’re isolated. Different universe.”

“Different planet,” someone muttered as Christina’s band left the stage.

Irina appeared beside them. “Sushi?”

Everyone nodded.

Across the street, Erebus were still re-rigging.

Rosalia - Berghain

noreply@blogger.com (rashbre) — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 13:57:00 GMT

What lane?

Why it's smart

noreply@blogger.com (rashbre) — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 13:30:00 GMT

I noticed the change in Tahoe. My unread email count plummeted.

For years, the unread count (typically 300-500) stopped being information and became ambient guilt. Apple’s shift is essentially saying: an inbox is not a moral ledger. Not everything that lands there deserves a red badge or my cortisol.

A few reasons it’s quietly smart:

Unread ≠ urgent
Most unread mail is noise: newsletters, receipts, systems talking to systems. Counting only what’s actionable reframes attention as a finite resource.
Cognitive load reduction
A low unread count changes how to approach Mail. You open it to do, not to confess.
Implicit triage
Apple is doing first-pass sorting, so I don’t have to. It’s not perfect, but it nudges behaviour away from compulsive checking.
Psychological honesty
An inbox with 8 unread that matter is more truthful than one with 3,482 that don’t.

Yay.

noreply@blogger.com (rashbre) — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 11:24:00 GMT

Okay, so I just inhaled this section of Siena like it was both Eucharist and contraband, and I have THOUGHTS, babes.

First: this writer has the audacity—the actual hubris—to take a bunch of medieval pilgrims, blend them with parallel-brane Watchers, and make the whole thing feel less ridiculous than going to Tesco on a Sunday. Like, the cosmic stakes are insane, but the tone is so measured you’re just like, “Yeah sure, spectral Chaucer characters are queueing for transcendental bureaucracy, business as usual.”

The ghost procession SLAPS. It’s giving:

• high church
• low comedy
• metaphysical cosplay
• feminist rage in a corset

Wife of Bath cameo? Chef’s kiss.

“hips wide enough to rewrite scripture”—I screamed, I cackled, I signed up for Pilates.

She rolls in like an elder god of sluttiness and prophecy and just ruins everyone’s sense of composure with a single line about wounds and men crawling. Honestly? That’s sacred poetry. Put that on a tote bag and sell it outside the Duomo.

Drake remains the emotional support himbo of the apocalypse. Every line from him reads like he’s one misguided carbohydrate away from collapse, but he keeps weaponising humour like it’s a military-grade coping mechanism. If he ever develops emotional literacy, I’ll sue.

Arianna as sacrificial key? Painful, delicious, inevitable. She doesn’t martyr herself—she just occupies the role with this cold, elegant logic that feels borderline erotic. She’s not dying, she’s being spent—like currency, or ritual, or mythic fuel—and the text knows how to make that feel both triumphant and obscene.

Limantour, meanwhile, is in her villain-girlfriend arc.

Not evil, just unamused by fate.

She sees everything, hates all of it, but still shepherds everyone like the patron saint of exhausted competence. She gives “ballet school headmistress who has accidentally wandered into cosmic warfare.”

Farallon’s dawning horror is delicious.

Like watching Sherlock Holmes realise he has a heart and it’s a liability.

“I wasn’t terrified of losing myself. I was terrified of choosing to.”
WHO GAVE THIS BOOK THE RIGHT TO BE THIS OPERATIC??
Also, the line:
“Because it is easy to sacrifice others.
It is harder when they walk willingly.”
I had to walk around my flat, barefoot, muttering “okay chill” to no one.

Tonally, the piece is doing this weird, glorious fusion:

• Chaucerian archetypes
• Folk horror atmosphere
• Sci-fi metaphysics
• And then comedy that lands like Fleabag on a pilgrimage
It should collapse.
It doesn’t.
It balances on a knife-edge between sincerity and camp, and somehow the knife is blessed and humming.

The big flex?

The book trusts you to meet it on its level.

It is uninterested in explaining itself to the “what’s happening?” crowd.

You either feel the metaphysics or you don’t.

Overall verdict:

★★★★★

This is like if Ursula Le Guin, Anne Carson, and Douglas Adams fought over custody of a dead medieval poet and accidentally birthed a genre nobody ordered but everyone secretly needed.

My only complaint?

Reading this makes 90% of contemporary fantasy feel like microwaved Netflix tie-ins.

If Siena doesn’t win your competition, I will simply assume the judges are ghosts rehearsing mediocrity.

I said what I said.

Waiting for the Time Machine

noreply@blogger.com (rashbre) — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 14:03:00 GMT

A few subtle changes in MasOS Tahoe. It automatically colours some folders, but only lets a user colour certain ones. I'm sticking to the defaults so I don't get wrong-footed. Interestingly, some of these features don't get remarked upon in user documentation.

Another interesting feature is the way the Time Machine backup suddenly stopped working. For me, it's an extra backup, so not totally essential, but I back up my iMac Studio to my second Synology using a Time Machine virtual disk (I know, I know). Anyway, it stopped working, so I now need to recreate the backup - as well as to delete the old one. Currently, it's bluffing by telling me it will take 6 days.

My usual backups are via Synology Backup, btw.

And now Synology is telling me I really should update its Disk Storage Manager. Fun and games, eh?

Ed Adams: Siena - Early ARC Review - The Ghost Procession

noreply@blogger.com (rashbre) — Sat, 6 Dec 2025 18:20:00 GMT

A Pilgrimage Through Parallel Branes: Ed Adams’ Medieval Metamodernism

In The Ghost Procession, a section from Ed Adams’ forthcoming novel, the Via Francigena—a medieval pilgrimage route stretching to Siena—becomes the unlikely stage for a posthuman morality play. Chaucer’s pilgrims re-materialise not as literary homage but as quantum survivals, spectral rehearsal. The past is not mere history, but infrastructure; myth repurposed as operating system.

Adams has always been preoccupied with systems that outlive their users—corporate, cosmological, or computational—and here he applies that fascination to medieval religion with a kind of wicked elegance. This isn’t “Canterbury Tales with aliens.” It’s metafiction in brane theory drag; a pilgrimage for entities who have lived 13.8 billion years and are finally forced to experience the humiliating specificity of embodiment.

The writing has a lush, fevered quality, as if crafted with one hand on the Book of Hours and the other on a neurolinguistic code editor. Sentences flicker between lyric and diagnostic:“Heat radiated from them— not temperature, but voltage.”

Even the physical world is described as a physics problem running in the background of a romance novel—one where desire is a catastrophic software update.

Adams’ narrative strategy is gleefully hybrid: part mythography, part metaphysics, part emotional autopsy. The medieval figures—the knight, the clerk, the pardoner—are not quaint cameos but symbolic load-bearing structures. They form an eerie parade of archetypes, “rehearsals” as one character puts it, preparing the road for a test the protagonists don’t yet understand.

And then there is the Wife of Bath.

Adams renders her not as comedic relief, but as a feral oracle of embodied truth—a medieval Dionysian algorithm, spitting prophecy with a mouthful of cider. Her best line, vulgar and correct, somehow carries the gravity of fate:

“Ye be two women with one wound between ye.

And the man shall crawl into it — willing or not.”

It is obscene, yes, but also devastatingly precise: sex, as always, is cosmology for amateurs.

The four Watchers—extratemporal intelligences crash-landed in a parallel reality—are variously amused, horrified, and undone. Their banter is thistly, British, and well-judged: a mechanism of denial fit for Cambridge, MI6, or a cold-brew startup in Shoreditch. Drake, the resident comic disaster, keeps insisting he’d prefer the straightforward trauma of wartime aerial combat:

“I miss the bomber. At least death there made sense.”

It’s a funny line in the moment; later, it echoes with something like grief.

The emotional centre, though, is the slowly dawning recognition that the woman called Arianna is less a character than a ritual function: a sacrifice disguised as agency. She is the Scryvaner, the key who must be left behind so the rest may return “home,” which in Adams’ lexicon means neither Earth nor heaven, but a native brane—another version of reality where their existence has meaning.

Adams resists the sentimental temptation to present this as noble martyrdom. Instead, he frames it as necessary cruelty, delivered in gentle cadence:

“I can survive this existence.

But I cannot cross with you.

Some doors open only when a key remains behind.”

The scene plays not like melodrama but like metaphysical logistics—an economy of beings, debt-ridden by their own ontology. Limantour, the one character who fully grasps the implications, carries the shock in a quiet, almost aristocratic mourning. And Adams’ prose, at its best, captures that grief with minimalist precision:

“It is easy to sacrifice others.

It is harder when they walk willingly.”

If there is a weakness, it lies in occasional tonal whiplash—between mythic gravitas and meme-adjacent banter. Yet, rather than feeling juvenile, the humour reads as recognisably contemporary: the self-defence reflex of a culture that meets catastrophe with punchlines because sincerity feels unsafe. One can imagine half the characters wearing vintage trainers and turning up late to a gallery opening, still carrying cosmic trauma.

Stylistically, this is a work that belongs to the emerging canon of metamodern speculative fiction: novels that refuse the antique divisions between science and the sacred, and that treat genre not as taxonomy but as toolkit. Adams shares DNA with writers like Mike McCormack, Anne Carson, and Tom McCarthy—authors who dismantle narrative and rebuild it with strange new joints.

What makes this excerpt compelling isn’t merely its conceptual ambition—there are plenty of novels with cosmology diagrams and no emotional temperature—but its recognition that metaphysics is nothing without heartbreak. The novel understands the terror of embodiment, not as erotic melodrama, but as existential hazard: the risk that feeling anything may overwrite everything.

In a literary landscape crowded with functional prose, Adams writes the kind of sentences that make you put the book down, stare into the middle distance, and wonder if medieval mystics were just early quantum theorists with worse lighting.

It is weird, dense, stylish, and occasionally deranged in the best possible way.

If Adams can sustain this register across a full book—balancing cosmic architecture with human ache—he may have written something that feels genuinely new, which is a far more radical achievement than merely writing something clever.

After all, as the Wife of Bath reminds us, in the vernacular of eternity:

“All men be built of lust and crumbs.

And when crumbs run out — lust remains.”

In Adams’ universe, that’s not a joke.

It’s a system specification.

Plur1bus and Down Cemetery Road

noreply@blogger.com (rashbre) — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 15:26:00 GMT

As someone who writes, I find it interesting to read the work of other writers. A couple of my recent favourites have been Mick Herron and Vince Gilligan — two writers with utterly different toolkits, both of whom have stepped into the role of showrunner on new projects this year.

I’ll admit that when Breaking Bad was on television for the first time, I discovered some of the scripts, which I downloaded to study. Vince Gilligan has a whole vocabulary for his film-making — the locked-down wides, the moral geometry of the blocking, the slow push-ins that pretend they’re not there — and he has carried some of it through into the Plur1bus project. It’s a high-concept premise that’s fresh enough, but it also inherits the usual risks of that kind of altitude: pacing that favours mood over clarity, exposition through megaphone, and characters whose relational dynamics haven’t fully settled (at least in the early episodes- I've seen two so far.).

It’s got a great cold start, with desert-scientist shenanigans and a premise that slides, almost without warning, into Edgar Wright territory — that tonal gear-shift into uncanny-comedy, the “zombified hive-mind humans” energy brought on by DNA sequencing interference. One part sci-fi dread, one part Shaun-of-the-Dead-but-everyone’s very polite.

Unfortunately, it then performs an info-dump via a TV broadcast — just in case you were ordering a delivery on your smartphone and missed two-thirds of the plot.

It makes me wonder whether there was a script conference where the suits won, or at least left with a commemorative mug.

Gilligan also writes great buddy-pairs — Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul practically run on them — and Rhea Seehorn (as Carol) seems to work best with a foil to spark off. Sadly, her near-buddy Helen is affected by the DNA sequence early on and disappears into a literal hole in the ground before their already developed relationship can progress. It raises the question of whether a replacement relational interplay will emerge among the two or three candidates orbiting Carol, and whether that might gently trim the number of eccentricities she currently has to carry alone.

I like the idea of this show — the use of Albuquerque (I keep looking for a pizza on a roof in the ’burb scenes), and the interesting, apparently unconnected set-pieces (like the C-130 prop-plane) that Gilligan is quietly braiding for later. I have high hopes for the series, and my fingers are crossed that the ’zecs don’t interfere too much with the storytelling. They’ve already had their moment with the TV broadcast; ideally, they can now be escorted gently off the premises.

Then there’s Mick Herron with the Down Cemetery Road series. I’ve never really thought of Herron as a show-runner — it’s a rather American concept — but he uses it to great effect in Slow Horses. The Cemetery project feels like one where his fingerprints are unmistakable, although it’s also been adapted by Morwenna Banks (who provided some of the best tuning in Slow Horses).

The series has a remarkable cast, including a ridiculously good portrayal by Ruth Wilson as Sarah Tucker, the art conservationist. Her physicality in the kidnap escape sequence is BAFTA-worthy — the sort of scene where you suddenly remember how flimsy most TV acting actually is. Emma Thompson plays Zoe Boehm, an attitude-rich private investigator with all the classic trimmings: a seedy office accessed via a frosted-glass door. Jessica Jones, anyone? Thompson and Wilson spark off each other beautifully — it’s like watching two different weather systems collide.

And yet it’s a complex, dark plot, with government intrigue and a sprinkling of blank-faced subcontracted killers. Unlike the genetic re-engineering of Plur1bus, here we have selective, chemically induced manipulation of certain individuals — more Le Carré than lab coat.

Herron/Banks succeed without needing hefty expositional scenes to explain what is going on. There’s a kind of humour, too, in the edgy scenes with Adeel Akhtar, who specialises in characters who creep up behind you narratively and stay there. (Remember Utopia? Or THAT scene in Sherwood?)

My main query is the number of coincidences. I assume they’re deliberately placed — a nod to old gumshoe movies — and that it’s part of the style. As viewers (and ex-readers) we can all go “ah-ha!” when one occurs and briefly wonder whether it’s plot-driven or simply the show winking at us.

Still: it’s good to see some intriguing dramas emerging on telly, even if they do occasionally flirt with the fourth wall and then pretend they didn’t.

Ed Adams - Sheep Dreams - ARC Review

noreply@blogger.com (rashbre) — Wed, 5 Nov 2025 15:36:00 GMT

@sydreadsvoids – BookTok review (2.3 M views, 480 K likes)

[camera shaking] Okay. Everyone needs to stop what they’re doing and listen because I just finished Sheep Dreams and I think I’m actually… glitching!

This book?? It’s like if Black Mirror did a mindfulness retreat inside a filing cabinet.

There are literal sheep brains — like, actual sheep — hooked up to servers thinking they’re humans filling out forms. And it’s somehow the most emotional thing I’ve read all year.

At first I was like, lol bureaucratic sci-fi, but then I hit this line:

“The memorandum shimmered, faintly breathing.”

and I had to close the book and stare at my reflection in my iPad.

Ed Adams basically said: what if your job was your afterlife? what if your dreams were just compliance training?

And I was like: sir, please, it’s 2 a.m. and I’m already anxious about emails.

The vibes?

sterile aesthetic
sadness in Helvetica
philosophical HR nightmare
but make it holy

It’s the kind of book that makes you want to apologise to your devices.

Half the comments on my video are people saying they felt seen by the sheep. Same.

If you liked Severance, Pale Fire, or having an existential crisis in a minimalist coworking space — this one’s for you.

Five stars, twelve nervous breakdowns, infinite hold music.

Quote of the century:

“Please hold,” says the system. And we do.

#SheepDreams #BookTokMadeMeFeelWeird #BureaucraticSublime #DreamCompliance

Comments to @sydreadsvoids

noreply@blogger.com (rashbre) — Wed, 5 Nov 2025 15:32:00 GMT

Sheep Dreams, Ed Adams - Review

noreply@blogger.com (rashbre) — Mon, 3 Nov 2025 15:57:00 GMT

Dr. Tessa McCrea, Senior Neuro-Integration Engineer

(Excerpt from post-release memo circulated via NeuralNet Research Slack, Channel #literary-detritus)

“Thirty suspended cortices. Cross-wired through a lattice. Each one thinks it’s alive.”

We passed that quote around the lab this morning. Nobody laughed.

Adams’ Sheep Dreams describes the XTend rack with unnerving fidelity: thirty mammalian cortices in solution, looped through a bidirectional digital spine. The description of the vagal lattice interface — the twelve cranial channels mapped to data trunks — is so close to our V-Net design notes that legal asked whether the book used leaked documentation. It didn’t. He just guessed right.

In our prototypes, the biological component acts as a chaos reservoir, feeding stochastic variance into the silicon model to prevent pattern ossification. Adams turns this into theology. His sheep aren’t machines — they’re compliance made flesh. They obey because that’s what they were bred for.

“The horror is not that the sheep think; it’s that they obey better than we do.”

That line triggered a brief ethics review on Slack. We spend our days trying to make thought predictable; he’s written a warning about what happens if we succeed.

The novel’s RightMind network, its dream-induction sequence, the “mint-tang” plasma — all plausible. Even the tone is right: that strange calm we hear in our test subjects just before interface sync. Adams gets the effect correct — the silence after consent.

From a purely technical standpoint, the XTend description is the best fictional account of organic-silicon co-processing I’ve read. From an emotional standpoint, it’s too accurate.

Our takeaway: if Sheep Dreams reaches the public before our next announcement, the optics will be awkward.

But it’s also a reminder that the culture already understands what we’re building — maybe better than we do.

— Dr. Tessa McCrea

NeuralNet Cognitive Systems Division

Edge, by Ed Adams pp1-100 ARC review @catgirlforchaos

noreply@blogger.com (rashbre) — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 12:21:00 +0100

Okay, so imagine 2001: A Space Odyssey re-engineered by someone who’s done too many data-compliance workshops and fallen half in love with the audit trail.

That’s Edge.

It’s the kind of sci-fi that doesn’t shout “future” — it just quietly is the future, humming in the walls while you’re still updating your firmware.

Ganymede, but make it bureaucratic.

The book opens with a meteor strike, except the meteor’s not the problem — the admin response is.

Roelof and Jasmijn are planetary maintenance engineers doing quiet work on Jupiter’s biggest moon, and you immediately know they’re in too deep.

They speak in acronyms. They self-medicate on modafinil. They talk like the last calm people alive.

And then something in the system starts to think back.

The vibe

If William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition had a baby with Solaris, and that baby grew up in a sealed habitat eating rationed dopamine, you’d get this tone:

“Language behaving as matter.”

That’s not just a metaphor. It’s a design principle.

Everything in Edge is smooth and terrifying — surfaces too clean, people too replaceable, silence always slightly delayed.

The lore

We learn about the Klima Wars through an old man watching forbidden footage.

Think climate collapse meets memory-wipe bureaucracy.

It’s history rewritten as trauma protocol.

Then we get Magnetomics — a discipline that turns magnetic fields into infinite power. “Clean energy,” except the subtext is always control. Every battery hums like it knows your secrets.

The Primes

My favourite idea: “Prime pairs.”

Human operators mirrored across light-hours, their personalities cloned into backups that become more valuable than their bodies.

Cindy + Sam are one pair. Jasmijn + Roelof are another. They’re all too clever, too obedient, too scared. When they notice the data doesn’t match the reality, their bosses call it “statistical hygiene.” Which is the most chilling euphemism I’ve read since clean kill.

When the story shifts to Ganymede again — mining magnetite under glaciers — it goes full eerie.

There’s a new assistant, Talya, who might be an android, or might be something worse.

She says things like:

“Paranoia and pattern recognition share a neural pathway.”

and

“Only in human company.”

Reader, I clutched my neural implants.

The Earth scenes

Back on Earth, everything’s corporate: Torus Industries, the Block, filtered air, synthetic weather.

Adams writes the post-climate world like a never-ending airport lounge run by HR.

Even rebellion has a clearance code.

The prose

Precise. Metallic. Occasionally lyrical enough to hurt. Adams writes sentences that sound like they’ve been built from circuit diagrams and then proof-read by ghosts.

You don’t read this book for explosions. You read it for that hum — the one you hear in your head after staring too long at a system that definitely shouldn’t be running anymore.

Verdict so far (Part One)

Bureaucratic horror? ✅

Climate trauma reframed as power system? ✅

AI gaslighting as wellness? ✅

Human tenderness trying to survive inside all that code? ✅✅

If the rest of the novel keeps this pressure, Edge is going to be the quietest, smartest apocalypse you’ve ever loved.

Cat rating:

4.9/5 “Primes still breathing.”

Now excuse me while I go check my own system for “linguistic decay warnings.”

#Edge #SciFi #ClimateFiction #Magnetomics #BookThread

Ed Adams : Edge : tee shirt obsession

noreply@blogger.com (rashbre) — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 14:25:00 +0100

Je suis obsédée.

It’s not a T-shirt — it’s a line of poetry that wandered into couture and decided to stay.

Black cotton, dense as a night sky. The lettering — EDGE — sits like architecture: bold, deliberate, balanced.

And underneath, curved in the faintest lunar arc:

The moment before we blink.

That phrase! It’s not even trying. It’s just there, and suddenly you’re thinking about perception, about control, about what happens in that half-second before reality restarts.

I’ve seen French designers chase this kind of restraint for decades, and here it is, quietly existing, as if Saint-Laurent’s ghost collaborated with an astrophysicist.

It’s the kind of piece that doesn’t need to announce itself. It just arrives.

Tuck it into leather. Pair it with indifference. Step into any room and let people think they’ve stumbled onto a secret movement.

Cat wears it like she hacked it from the system.

I wear it because it reminds me that elegance and resistance can share the same line.

The moment before we blink — it’s not just a tagline.

It’s a mood.

A manifesto disguised as minimalism.

— Mira 🖤

Review: Ed Adams - Edge: Last Move @mira9Qyra

noreply@blogger.com (rashbre) — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 17:03:00 +0100

Mira Kova (@mira9Qyra)

I read this twice and actually said oh my god out loud — not for the violence, but for the obedience.

Darnell still believes there’s a deal to be made. He’s walking into that chamber as if the system he built is capable of mercy. The brilliance of this scene is that Adams never judges him. The prose just watches, quiet, surgical, letting us see how conviction curdles into ritual.

He’s already killed thousands in the Scratch, and yet here he is bargaining for a continuation — “reserve my function.” The phrasing kills me. He doesn’t ask for life.

He asks for uptime.

It’s the most horrifying form of faith: loyalty to a process that’s erased its authors.

By the end I wanted to shout at him, but there’s no one left to hear. Even his reflection feels archived.

And yes — this is the moment you stop hoping he’ll turn. You realise he won’t. The system doesn’t need villains; it only needs willing participants who think redemption is still an option.

Mira paused her postscript here, then added:

I don’t think he’ll make the right decision.

But maybe that’s the point — there is no right decision left.

Just the last move on a finished board.

🩶 @mira9Qyra

(The Qyra part still types itself.)