THE FAR SHORE

Damato’s (Breaking Seas, 2012), SF adventure finds a secret group of scientists attempting to flee a repressive society and colonize Mars.

In the year 2065, a regime called Global Harmony has erased the history books and brought peace to the world—under its rule. The Autoridad, the agency that governs the region of Alta California, watches everyone all the time by using “infinite microscopic devices.” For citizens who break the rules, there are reeducation centers or suicide pills. “Children belong to the community,” says Global Harmony, and even saying the words “mother” or “father” is unacceptable. Seventeen-year-old Cristina Flores hates this life, and she secretly treasures an illegal book about NASA’s Apollo missions—a gift from her father, Paco—and dreams of attending Peking University to become an aerospace engineer. She has the math skills and intelligence to do so, but her Trust Score (or social rating) is low. While celebrating the Chēngzhăng moon flights at school, she speaks up about the Apollo missions. For this transgression, she must report to “therapeutic counseling” at the Santa Monica police station. From there, she ends up at Central Services, a holding pen for dissidents. After acing several intelligence tests, she’s brought before Dr. Janet Ordin, who tells her that she’s a “pre-select,” without defining what that means. Next, her sanity is challenged in a cramped room called the Ninth Circle, where she meets Ryder Lawson and Eric Rahn, among other university graduates. Eventually, Cristina joins the Genesis project—a secret group of scientists who plan to escape Global Harmony’s grasp by traveling in rockets to create a new colony on Mars. Damato’s first novel is a hard-SF stunner that effectively examines social dilemmas in 2019. The Trust Score is similar to China’s real-life Social Credit System, which launched in 2014 with the aim of preventing low scorers from enjoying the full benefits of citizenship, such as using public transportation. Even more chilling is Global Harmony’s elimination of the past and veneration of government officials, such as the vapid Gov. Marco Javier Crespo. At one point, when Cristina reads a quote by French historian Alexis de Tocqueville, she assumes that he’s a fellow member of the Genesis project. Damato portrays technology wisely—as neither good nor bad by itself, but merely a tool; the Autoridad digitally alters people’s images in “promo” videos that show health and happiness where neither exist, but similarly high-tech 3D printers and nuclear reactors enable the Mars escape plan. In the novel’s second third, the author’s flair for depicting realistic space travel rivals anything in Andy Weir’s 2014 bestseller The Martian. The ship Enterprise, for example, is said to have “magnetoplasma rockets that generate intense electromagnetic fields to ionize argon propellant into plasma.” Cristina’s reverence for her father provides narrative dividends, as well; he taught her to always “Say what was required. But do your own math”—a nod to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four notion that 2+2=5 in a dictatorship.

A plausible and harrowing adventure that explores humanity’s drive for personal freedom.