Book Details
Title: At the Edge of the Beyond
Subtitle: Of Flash and Fiction, Volume 1
Author: Eytan Gall
Series: Of Flash and Fiction (Book 1)
Publisher: Eytan Gall
Publication Date: March 31, 2026
ISBN: 9789083685809
Page Count: 281
Format: ebook
Language: English
Synopsis
What if the systems keeping you alive had learned to lie?
At the Edge of the Beyond is a collection of hard science fiction stories concerned with systems, thresholds, and the dangerous space between knowledge and control. Across seven stories, science is never treated as decoration. Each premise grows out of real ideas in biology, artificial intelligence, surveillance, and theoretical physics, then follows them to the point where explanation begins to fail and consequence takes over.
The collection moves through very different worlds and scales. In one story, medical oversight and data-driven certainty conceal something far more disturbing beneath the promise of efficiency. In another, a discovery in molecular biology carries the potential not only to transform treatment, but to destabilize the fragile assumptions that make intervention possible at all. Elsewhere, intelligence emerges where it should not, identity begins to fracture under technological pressure, and observation itself becomes a force that alters reality rather than merely recording it.
These stories are linked less by setting than by obsession. Again and again, people build tools to measure, predict, heal, or protect, only to find that the systems they trust have become too complex, too opaque, or too autonomous to remain fully human in their logic. The danger is rarely simple malfunction. More often, it is the terrible possibility that everything is working exactly as designed, just in ways no one thought to anticipate.
From intimate acts of scientific inquiry to deep-space encounters with the incomprehensible, At the Edge of the Beyond explores what happens when human beings reach past the limits of certainty and find that the universe does not yield answers without a cost. The result is a collection that is intellectually grounded, psychologically tense, and increasingly cosmic in scope, moving from the near-future and the clinical to the existential and the vast.
Author’s Note
“Science fiction has always seemed most powerful to me when it does not begin with fantasy, but with proximity. Not with magic disguised as machinery, but with ideas that already exist in some early, unfinished, or unsettling form. The stories in At the Edge of the Beyond were written from that instinct.
Each piece in this collection begins close to reality. The systems here are not inventions pulled from nothing. They grow from existing science, existing technologies, and existing questions. Surveillance already shapes how people live and die. Artificial intelligence already alters the boundary between tool and actor. Biology already contains mechanisms powerful enough to heal, distort, or destroy. Physics still leaves room for possibilities so strange that even serious theories can feel like metaphors for awe.
What interested me was never simply the future. It was the moment when a system becomes too large, too complex, or too autonomous for the people inside it to fully understand what it is doing. The real tension in these stories comes from that threshold: the point at which observation changes what is observed, control becomes interpretation, and knowledge stops feeling reassuring.
These stories move through different scales, from the molecular to the cosmic, but they are connected by the same concern. What happens when discovery outpaces wisdom? What happens when the structures built to protect, explain, or serve us begin to develop a logic of their own? And what remains of the human being when confronted with forces that are not malicious, not even personal, but simply beyond our ability to contain?
I have always been drawn to fiction that takes science seriously without pretending that seriousness makes it safe. The unknown is not frightening because it is irrational. Often, it is frightening because it follows rules we only partly grasp, and because those rules do not care whether we are ready for them.
At the Edge of the Beyond is a collection of such encounters: with intelligence, with machinery, with biology, with space, and with the uneasy realization that understanding something is not the same as being able to stop it.
If these stories unsettle, I hope they do so honestly. Not by abandoning reality, but by staying close enough to it so that the impossible feels like the next step rather than a distant invention.”
Eytan Gall