James Smythe

James Smythe builds science fiction around large speculative ideas and tightly focused psychological pressure as a British novelist and screenwriter. The Edge is the third volume in the Anomaly Quartet, following The Explorer and The Echo. Published by HarperCollins in 2021, it takes place as the vast object called the Anomaly approaches Earth after earlier missions failed to explain it. On an orbital research station, Ali and the other scientists must determine whether the object can be stopped while mistrust grows inside the crew. Smythe keeps the planetary threat close to Ali’s private concern for her young son, joining cosmic scale with an immediate desire to return home. His other fiction includes The Machine and the teen Australia sequence, written as J. P. Smythe. The Edge extends the quartet’s continuing investigation of identity, isolation, memory, and survival, using the research station to narrow an immense danger into decisions made among people who cannot be certain whom to trust.