Review: Future's Edge

Future's Edge by Gareth L. Powell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've read quite a few of Gareth Powell's books over the years, including the excellent Embers of War trilogy. This book is a standalone, and a satisfying one at that--everything is wrapped up quite nicely. Not that I have anything against series as long as the author can sustain the worldbuilding and characters, but there's also something to be said for a book that makes its point and brings the story to a natural, concise end. POwell's books tend to run on the lean side; this one is only three hundred pages. But it has his typical grand canvas of a space opera, reaching billions of years into the past and hundreds into the future, with an ordinary protagonist--an archaeology student--who finds she is holding the future of the human race in her hands.

This is Ursula Morrow, and the book opens two years after the near-extinction of humans, caused by a extradimensional alien species called the Cutters who appeared on Earth two years before and laid waste to the planet. The Cutters, for unknown reasons, hunt down sentient spacefaring species and wipe them out (thus providing a nasty answer to Fermi's paradox). Ursula, along with other surviving humans, have taken refuge on a planet called Void's Edge, at the furthest end of the "tramline network," the pathways through underspace that this universe uses to travel faster than light. But everyone knows this is only temporary, as the Cutters are coming. New tramline ships are being constructed and sent out, loaded with refugees, to traverse the massive interstellar void close to the system and hopefully out of the Cutters' reach. But those ships are only available to those who can afford them, and Ursula, running a makeshift bar in the refugee camp, cannot.

As we find out in the very first chapter, just before the Cutters decimated Earth Ursula was on a xenoarchaelogical dig with her boyfriend, Jack. This was a new relationship, and Ursula being young (she was somewhere in her mid-twenties), she was distracted by thoughts of Jack at a crucial moment. The dig had found an alien artifact, and Ursula took off her glove and touched it--and was infected with an alien parasite. This parasite didn't seem to harm her; in fact, it gave her superstrength and made her well-nigh invulnerable. After weeks of tests, she was released from isolation--just as the Cutters came to Earth. Jack got her on one of the last transports out and joined the Interstellar Navy. For the past two years he has been conducting a guerrilla war in Earth's solar system against the Cutters, on his sentient warship the Crisis Actor.

Now, two years later, Jack has come in search of Ursula, because he believes the object she touched is a weapon and might hold the key to saving humanity. In a very Gareth L. Powell twist (he does love his sentient AIs) the Crisis Actor has a humanlike avatar to interact with the rest of the crew, known as Cris, and Jack has married her.

These three characters spend a not-inconsiderable amount of time working out their relationships and how they feel about each other. However, this does not overwhelm the overarching plot, as Ursula and Jack return to the dig where the object was found, and Ursula discovers exactly what it is and why the Cutters have destroyed every species that advances to the technological point of using the undervoid tramlines. (Short version: the Precursors, an ancient extinct alien species, believes there are entities in the undervoid, Lovecraftian-style monsters from the sound of it, and they want to avoid disturbing them at all costs. That this made the Cutters, which the Precursors created, every bit as monstrous as those entities no one has seen is glossed over a bit, but there's no time to delve further into it. Also, the Cutters apparently caused the asteroid extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs? That's a fascinating tidbit that is sadly not explored, as it implies that some dinosaurs were intelligent and had created a spacefaring civilization.)

At the end, Ursula uses Precursor tech to ferry the refugees of many species across the interstellar void from Void's Edge, where they will build a new society of cooperation and using the tramlines as little as possible.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, although I wish it had been a little longer, so what the Precursors did could have been further discussed. Nevertheless, this is a satisfying standalone story.

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