Prime Meridian by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Prime Meridian by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a near-future novella that has been sitting in my TBR for a surprisingly long time, although the release date is this month. (The reason is that the review copies were sent out close to the crowdfunding campaign for the book.)

Amelia dreams of Mars. The Mars of the movies and the imagination, an endless bastion of opportunities for a colonist with some guts. But she’s trapped in Mexico City, enduring the drudgery of an unkind metropolis, working as a rent-a-friend, selling her blood to old folks with money who hope to rejuvenate themselves with it, enacting a fractured love story. And yet there’s Mars, at the edge of the silver screen, of life. It awaits her.

This book was kind of bleak, albeit not completely devoid of hope. Set in a future Mexico City so near that, aside from the colonies on Mars, it could be tomorrow. Amelia, our main character, has a shitty life living on the poverty line and dreaming of moving to Mars.

The story is mostly about her trying to make ends meet and save up enough to buy a ticket to Mars in a very gig-based economy (at least for the not-wealthy). Her main job is working as a sort of rent-a-friend (via an app) and, among other things, listening to an old lady talk about her life as a movie starlet in pulpy science fiction movies (especially the one set on Mars).

This wasn't a terrible story but I didn't love it. It was a very mundane kind of bleak which wasn't particularly what I expected from the cover art. I also thought there'd be more experiences of Mars in it, but Amelia doesn't see it for herself during the novella. We just hear a lot of different things about how much better or worse it is there which doesn't give much of a feeling of hope. I mean, I think that was what the author was going for, but it wasn't really what I was hoping to read.

I recommend Prime Meridian to fans of near-future and mundane SF who don't mind reading something that isn't too cheerful. I wasn't a huge fan, but I will probably check out some of the author's other work in the future (for example Signal To Noise, a novel I bought on sale some time ago).

4 / 5 stars

First published: July 2018 (backer copies December 2017),  Innsmouth Free Press
Series: No
Format read: eARC
Source: Publisher via NetGalley