In some ways, Future’s Edge by British SF writer Gareth L Powell is exactly what the doctor ordered. I’ve been a bit out of sorts with science fiction lately, and Decided that what I really wanted was a dose of good old fashioned space opera.
So here we have such a thing, mixed in with a bit of military science fiction, some (not quite) first contact, some technological sublime, and a dash of body horror. We begin in the kind of rough and ready frontier camp familiar from Westerns (think Deadwood) in the aftermath of a catastrophic attack on Earth by mysterious aliens. A local bar owner is waiting for something: possibly the man she left behind, or possibly a ticket out. But it turns out she has a back story: thanks to an enounter with an alien artifact, she is more or less indestructible.
Then the ex turns up and he has a mission for her: they need to go back to the artifact, which might be the weapon they need. Cue road trip. In space.
The plot motors along fairly efficiently and the novel has a lot of the ingredients I like in a science fiction novel… but I just don’t think they blend very well. Perhaps this is trying to take in too many of those sub-genres of science fiction. There is so much here that it all feels as if it is dealt with too superficially. Most of the characters are mere sketches, and there is perhaps just a little too much hand waving. How the main character turns from archaeologist to bad-ass is a case in point. I might have preferred her to remain a bit of a nerd. All this, and the phrase deus ex machina is used at the end, as if to hang a lantern on the fact that the ending is really a bit too much that.
Anyway, perhaps my problem with science fiction isn’t the science fiction. Perhaps it is me. After 50+ years of reading this stuff, I’ve just grown too fussy.

It was always going to be hard not to give five stars to a book that features at least two Aliens quotes, but fortunately Powell backs them up with another of his trademark rollicking space operas. His usual focus on warmth and human connection is here (even if not al the leads are strictly human), but it’s juggled with maybe the nastiest and most chilling villains he has come up with yet. There’s no tonal whiplash though, just an emphasising of what’s at stake if we lose. It’s a thoroughly modern book, but still manages to evoke the sense of wonder that attracted me to the genre when I was a kid trawling the local library for classic SF.

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 (more on that unfortunate name below), 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.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.

I like Gareth Powell’s smooth writing and fluid, believable dialogue. His novels have an amiable quality to them, even when they describe unbelievably dire circumstances, that always pulls me through to the conclusion. Future’s Edge is no exception. While archeologist heroine Ursula is altered by an alien virus, inhabits a refugee camp, and is witnessing the likely destruction of humanity, there is a strong streak of humor and affection to the book’s tone. As she is reunited with her soldier ex-husband and his intelligent warship she undertakes a variety of adventures of increasing danger and galactic importance. Yet, the likeability remains. The conclusion is grounded in the spirits of compromise, amicability, cooperation, and love, as I would expect and enjoyed.