When bestselling memoirist Glenn Damato, author of Breaking Seas (2012),set out to write his first novel, The Far Shore, he took inspiration from the SF novels that captivated him as a youth growing up in New Jersey in the 1960s at the height of the space race. “One of my earliest memories,” he says, “was watching the Project Gemini launch when I was 5. My mom said, ‘There’s two guys in that rocket.’ It excited me to a degree that is almost impossible to describe—the way it brought the world together, the courage those astronauts showed, and the way such technology was put together in such a short period of time.”

Damato attended the University of Iowa for its astronomy program, which had always been a lifelong passion. Reading, though, not so much. His background, he says, was “extremely working-class. My parents did not graduate high school. They didn’t read books, and they didn’t encourage [the habit]. The only person in my family who liked books was my Aunt Peg, whom I was not directly related to. When I was 10, she gave me a shopping bag full of adult-level SF. A lot of it was over my head, but that’s what ignited my imagination.”

In that bag was Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, which Damato cites as the book that first kindled his aspirations of being a writer. In that book, he says, “Heinlein created such an authentic-feeling world. Everything the characters did was based on science, but it wasn’t overloaded with techno-speak. It was about the people.” 

The Far Shore is imbued with that book’s influence. One reviewer described it as a cross between The Martian and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Damato agrees that is a solid elevator pitch. The book is set in 2065 in a region of California. Seventeen-year-old Christina rebels against a totalitarian regime that keeps intimate tabs on its citizens via “infinite microscopic devices.” Reeducation centers, or suicide pills, are provided for rule breakers, but Christina has a willful mind of her own: 

I say things people don’t want to hear….Why should words be a crime? I mean, it’s my mouth, and my brain. I’ll never shut up. My long history of misconduct has scarcely begun.

Christina is a math genius, which brings her to the attention of other brilliant and like-minded peers who are working secretly within the system to escape the planet and begin a new life on Mars. “We leave soon, and there is no turning back,” she is told. “We will be the first humans on Mars, and there will be no outside assistance of any kind. I will not bullshit you. There is a likelihood you may die. So decide if this is what you want.”

Fans of The Twilight Zone may think they detect the influence of the classic episode “Third From the Sun” in which a group of people race against time to leave the planet in advance of a nuclear war. But Damato states that he was not a fan of the anthology series. He acknowledges that, like the best of SF, creator Rod Serling used the genre to explore a variety of ideas and address contemporary social issues. “But a lot of the episodes dealt with the paranormal, and I’m not interested in that,” he says. “I like the hard stuff.”

Kirkus Reviews calls The Far Shore “a hard-SF stunner that effectively examines social dilemmas in 2019. The author’s flair for depicting realistic space travel rivals anything in Andy Weir’s 2014 bestseller The Martian. A plausible and harrowing adventure that explores humanity’s drive for personal freedom.” 

Damato lives in Marina Del Rey, California, and works in data integration and management for an enterprise software company. He moved west 14 years ago to pursue a career writing screenplays. He took UCLA’s screenwriting program and did well, which gave him “a lot of confidence,” he says, but the spec script market collapsed. Friends encouraged him to write a book about a sailing trip around the world he took in 2004 at the age of 41. The success of Breaking Seas (Kirkus reviewed it favorably, it topped the nonfiction charts, and Sony Pictures Studios optioned a movie treatment) gave him further impetus to write his first novel. 

The Far Shoregrew out of Facebook group discussions Damato engaged in about space travel. “Everybody was fixated on the idea of going into space to mine asteroids or commercial projects like space tourism,” he says. “That led to me to consider what would compel humans to leave the planet and colonize the solar system. And beyond adventurers or those wanting to make money, I think it would be people who wanted to be free of living under tyrants. The way the 21st century is going, it’s not looking good for humanity; think Nazi Germany but with 21st-century technology.”

He opted to make his characters young adults—late teens or early 20s—which would give them a professional-level education but not a lot of adult experience. “If they grew up in a totalitarian society,” Damato explains, “they don’t know how to make their own decisions. How would that work if there was no one to tell them what to do?”

The Far Shore unfolds in three acts. The first is set in the totalitarian state that presents a realistic scenario on why people would risk their lives to leave the planet. The second is the flight to Mars. “I wanted to make it like Apollo 13,” Damato says. “Technically accurate but accessible and human, to convey what it really feels like to blast off in a rocket.” In the book’s provocative, final third act, he explores what it would feel like “to organize a self-governing body when one has no experience in that because they have never studied history.”

With The Far Shore, Damato wants to inspire young adult readers to think about science and technology beyond just the goal of making a better cellphone. “I really want to inspire young people to believe that with current technology they could be exploring Mars,” he says. “People growing up when I did had that feeling in their gut. Kids [today] don’t get inspired very easily. They’ve been taught that the world is doomed and to scale back their expectations. There is too much nihilism and pessimism. I wanted to write something that was more inspirational.”

Donald Liebenson is a Chicago-based writer.