Edge of the Known World

The future is uncertain but as long as there are people on the planet, there will be drama. The cities could be crumbling and the seas boiling but a few people gather in the same cave for protection, and it will be mere hours before they are arguing, falling in and out of love and not getting on with the art of survival. I imagine that in the Stone Age it was simpler - eat, or be eaten. By the time of the near future of Sheri T. Joseph’s Edge of the Known World, it is more about noodling and talking. 

When Alexandra Tashan became the youngest PhD to graduate from her institution, it was not society’s plan. She is the daughter of a convict and also a refuse, an illegal person. She survives by keeping her head down, but as a natural prankster and loudmouth, she tends to get noticed. When her father disappears Alex must risk it all to save him and finally make some allies. 

It is not easy to build a new science fiction future and populate it with characters, on top of this you want a coherent story. Joseph has delivered most of the ingredients needed to make a utopian future story, but it is not one that I could make sense of. I usually read over one hundred books a year, so I think I know my way around a novel, but I still struggle once or twice annually to understand a book. Science fiction, more than any other genre I read, can be unforgiving. 

I am not sure what was happening in Edge; I felt constantly confused about it. It is to do with Joseph’s writing style, the characters, and a lack of commitment in places to nail down what is happening at any given moment. 

There is a lot of layered complexity in the world of Edge, different factions, diverse ways of ruling. Alex is a complex character, and she discovers more complexity as the story progresses. This makes reading the book tricky enough, but you can count it as Hard Science Fiction, a genre that needs you to pay attention, but even when you do pay attention, I was lost. The final layer is the character’s personalities. They are academics and think like academics in a slightly abstract way, throwing in language and references at a higher intellectual level. This would be fine in a baser book, but it is just another layer of complexity. Joseph has a lot of the world building achieved through dialogue, there is more talking than doing in this book. 

It is not often that I find a book as confusing as Edge. It should be a basic road story about a woman in her 20s coming of age and coming to understand the world around her. This is lost somewhere in the complexity of place, character, and language. A fan of more literary fiction may gain more from the book, enjoying the prose over the journey. I found this one of the hardest reads of the year so far.