THE UNIFICATION MISSION

In Curtis’ SF sequel, a technophobic future humanity reckons with its choices on a mission to form an alliance with one of the galaxy’s most powerful species.

The humans of Earth—as well as those on Mars and other colonies—are unified under the democratic Joint Confederacy. They’ve made a collective decision to shirk most technology, including social media. As a result, the military is the primary user of cutting-edge tech, with most other people using only devices from the 20th century and earlier. In the first book of the Great Leap Backward series, The Mars One Incident(2019), Capt. Alma Johnson of the starship Indy became a hero for saving the JC during a dangerous mission to Mars. As a result, she and her crew are sent on another mission to the neighboring human civilization Shimbahn Unification of 5 to ask for advanced weaponry to face the growing threat from Terra Nova, a political group that wants to return technology to the rest of humanity. After a three-year journey in stasis, Alma and her crew awaken on the Unification planet, where the people look strangely similar to themselves. Soon, the crew of the Indy learns about the Unification’s odd customs, including acceptance of technology and religion not shared by those in the JC. Despite her apprehension regarding the Unification’s integration of technology into all citizens’ lives, Alma becomes close to the heir to the empire’s throne, which injects some contemporary romance into the space opera, complete with a fake-relationship trope that fans of the romance genre may enjoy. Over the course of the novel, Curtis plots the story well, and the graceful prose and character development successfully make the book seem less didactic than it is. Still, the moral superiority with which JC characters talk about tech may strike some readers as somewhat jarring, especially when the ostensible utopia they’re all trying to protect feels more like tyranny than the story seems to intend.

A space opera that asks compelling questions about technology dependence but whose answers lack nuance.