Eden by Hadley Coull

Eden by Hadley Coull
Publisher: Self-Published
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy
Rating: 3 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

‘How can we build such an ugly world, when life is so beautiful?’

London, 2063. As the Earth burns, the wealthy retreat into Eden, a dazzling mixed-reality simulation.

Max Fisher lives in a world of beauty and possibility, where painful memories can be overwritten by code. But something falters. Fragments of another reality begin to seep through, and the stories he believes in begin to unravel.

Eden is a work of speculative fiction scribbled in grief and glow, a story of our descent into images, and a meditation on love and tenderness in a dying world.

Perfection always comes with a price.

My favorite scenes were the ones that explored the reality of relying so heavily on technology and what we would refer to as the Internet for entertainment and socialization purposes. This is one of those topics that can be approached from multiple perspectives, and the author did a good job of providing nuanced and fair arguments for what they appear to think about this issue. If this were something I was discussing in a book club, the way the various characters approached cyber life would be the first thing I’d want to bring up due to how differently they all thought about it and how those reactions affected the storyline later on. Kudos for providing so much food for thought!

I struggled with the slow pacing of this novel. The main characters spent a good deal of time talking about their feelings which, while of course vitally important for character development, sometimes got in the way of developing the plot just as thoroughly. It will be interesting to see if readers who are well-versed in literary fiction feel the same way as I know that’s a common writing style for that genre and do hope it encourages some of them to check out other science fiction tales as well if they don’t already do so. There is definitely something to be said for mixing genres like this, but I simply wish a little more attention had been played to fleshing out the plot as it didn’t always have sufficient space to grow in my opinion.

On a positive note, there was a plot twist later on that reframed many of the things I believed I knew about the characters. While I can’t go into detail about exactly what that surprise involved due to how massive it was, I loved the way the author revealed it and thought it added a great deal of depth to the protagonist’s life in particular.

Eden was thought provoking.