SOL UMBRA

A 23rd-century scientist questions the massive project meant to save the climate-devastated world in Burgin’s SF series launch.

The key to saving the dying Earth may be Project Lux Umbra, a “lattice” of satellites that filter, reflect, or diffract sunlight. Adira Sol, a planetary biologist and systems ecologist, works on an orbit station where she monitors and tunes the satellites. It’s a dream job made even better when she meets and quickly falls for engineer Elias Renn. But after they’re both reassigned to a planet-side station in Colorado, Adira gradually loses trust in the project—why does it seem more invested in long-term stability than recovery? In one of the underground cities, she stumbles onto a “resistance movement” of humans opposing the artificial intelligences that built the planet-salvaging satellites. There’s much more to Lux Umbra than Adira knows, and she must determine whether the project’s measures for the greater good come at too high a price. Burgin delivers this tale with stripped-down, Hemingwayesque prose: “Her hands flew across the interface. Overriding neural lockouts. Disengaging hardline feeds. Stripping back the cognitive overlay—piece by piece by piece.” This instills the narrative with a frantic pace and an unrelenting sense of urgency as Adira finds herself in several tense situations, from searching for someone she’s lost to sneaking into a facility she definitely isn’t supposed to be entering. The topical environmental message is overt as protests, riots, and violence in the story stem from the belief that Lux Umbra is essentially killing the sky. Adira’s deeper dive into what’s really going on stirs up an intriguing mystery that leads to a handful of genuinely surprising revelations. Along the way, readers meet engaging characters who will, one hopes, return in a sequel.

This harrowing depiction of distant-future Earth makes for an exhilarating story.