Paul Di Filippo Reviews Exadelic by Jon Evans

Exadelic, Jon Evans (Tor ‎ 978-1250877734, hardcover, 448pp, $29.99) September 2023

The neologism that constitutes the title of Jon Evans’s mind-blowing new book (it’s the name of an all-powerful corporation) is certainly meant to conjure up echoes of “psychedelic,” and that allusiveness is substantiated by the over-the-top, enjoyably gonzo story itself. This off-the-rails, generously overstuffed, continuously surprising tale is what you might have gotten if Greg Egan had written The Illuminatus! Trilogy of Wilson and Shea, or if, instead of penning The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, scriptwriter Earl Mac Rauch had chosen to adapt Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast for the silver screen. (Heinlein is explicitly referenced by Evans at a few points, even making a cameo appearance, and the author does a credible homage to some of the latter-career tropes and attitudes of that Dean of SF.)

On the simplest, most reductionist level, Exadelic is an odyssey by our hero, Adrian Ross, across a multiversal skein of bizarre continua—the dark humor that is on exhibit, alongside some existential gravitas, makes comparisons to Robert Sheckley’s Dimension of Miracles also appropriate—but on a deeper level the book is a consideration of how one should or could live one’s life ethically and for the deepest humanistic satisfaction in the light of the ultimate ending we all face.

I have to confess that Evans, author of two previous books, has flown under my radar until now, but that I will certainly be on the alert for anything of his in the future.

The book is divided into five parts, and each one represents a ramping up or recomplication of what’s gone before. I fear I will have to leave Part Five unexplored here, since it’s really the capstone and out-of-left-field kicker to everything that’s gone before.

Part One opens in the present day with our hero, Adrian, in police custody, seemingly without cause. A nebbishy IT guy (yet with lots of genius friends who will all figure prominently in the plot), Adrian has been practically kidnapped by the cops as a terrorist. It turns out that his friends whom he’s known since youth—Meredith, Amara, Vika, Anthony, Darren, et al.—are involved with the creation of Coherence, the first true Artificial Intelligence. There are various factions amongst the clique, and some of them have identified Adrian as potentially valuable or destructive to Coherence. He himself can’t say why, natch. So now he becomes a pawn, swapped back and forth. When he finally gets to meet Coherence, he learns the bizarre truth.

The entire multiverse is a simulation, running on some godlike substrate/platform. And the simulation has a built-in “terminator” function: within days of a true AI being born, that continuum is automatically shut down. This is going to happen to Adrian and his world.

But there’s one chance to save everything, and that’s for Adrian to cast his mind mentally back in time, to inhabit his earlier self during a universal “rollback” engineered by the AI and change history. (Shades of X-Men: Days of Future Past.)

Now I should mention at this juncture that Evans succeeds in having his cake and eating it too. He gets to pull off some Matrix-like tricks generally associated with living in a sim, but yet, by not going too far, he maintains an organic granularity and physicality and, well, “sense of reality” for this reality. The reader never says, “Oh, all these people are just software on a circuit board, why should I care about them?” In fact, the whole notion of the simulation recedes into the background (until that climactic Part Five) and we are fully invested in these characters as flesh-and-blood people.

Part Two finds Adrian back in 2003 on his mission, and there’s lots of great, funny cultural-sensibility cognitive dissonance riffs. But unfortunately for his assignment, other conspirators are also present in 2003, and Adrian becomes their tortured captive as they extract essential qualities from him to further their magickal studies—magick being defined as mucking about with the sim’s operating system. After escaping Adrian learns that the multiverse has now been rolled back by various AI’s at least three times while he was otherwise occupied.

In Part Three, Adrian jumps timelines again, ending up on a primitive post-collapse Earth for a while, before fleeing once more and finding himself in 1940s California. His karma brings him into the circuit of Jack Parsons and company, that real-life historical figure who famously blended science and the occult. Parsons proves quite amenable to learning the true history of reality from Adrian, and will figure prominently from here on. And it’s here that Adrian falls in love with a local woman named Clara, whose ultimate fate in Part Five will provide much emotional resonance.

Part Four finds Adrian and his ragtag band of co-conspirators launched back again to 2023, but not, of course, the 2023 he once knew. The USA is split by a civil war using super-weapons, the resident AI is the strongest yet, and all the avatars of his old pals are intent on one last assault: to burst the bonds of the sim, exit into the ultimate reality, and confront the gods who have been directing their lives.

If my synopsis—which leaves out ninety percent of the book’s information—sounds bewildering, that’s because the novel is indeed a tricky labyrinth of information—but in a controlled, seductive way akin to the writings of the (now-forgotten) Ian Wallace (Croyd, etc.) or van Vogt. In his afterword, Evans also gives a nod to PKD. I can see the link, especially to something like PKD’s early Eye in the Sky. But overall, I never would have labeled Exadelic as Phildickian, because it hews to logic and rationality in a manner that Dick did not.

Ultimately, Exadelic seems to slot into a lineage of books which poke at the existential underpinnings of reality in a conspiratorial manner. I’m thinking of Howard Hendrix’s The Labyrinth Key and Max Barry’s Lexicon. But beyond the super-science cosmic shenanigans lies a humanist heart. For as Adrian observes towards the end of his adventures:

Were we being manipulated by some kind of exterior force? I supposed we couldn’t know, and likely wouldn’t ever. But it occurred to me then that this was true of everyone, a universal feature of the human experience. We didn’t know if we were plagued by demons or guided by angels, if we were algorithms in a simulation, or if our apparent free will was in truth the dream of a superintelligence. Even if by some freak event we penetrated a mystery, as I had, there would always be more beyond, kaleidoscopic, ineffable, ultimately unknowable. We were only human. No matter the secret truths of our situation, we would still have to do what humans did: muddle onward, hopefully toward a better world, with those we loved.

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