Prime Meridian

Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Jul 2018 · Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

About this ebook

From the bestselling author of Mexican Gothic comes a novella about the price of dreams in a ravaged near-future.

“A subtle and powerful tale of Mars, movies, and Mexico City which stands amongst the best novellas of the past few years.” —Jonathan Strahan, Locus

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.

Ratings and reviews

I loved this story. Amelia dreams of Mars -- despite the cover, it's set on earth and not Mars -- but she's stuck in a succession of poorly paid part-time gigs of dubious worth. She dances around obligations to her family and to her various jobs without really engaging with them, so her poor choices don't necessarily have the consequences she might deserve. Amelia is more sympathetic than that sounds, because her circumstances are not entirely her fault, and she lives in a society without much of a safety net. The story is set in the near future and it's a sort of a parable of the logical end-point of the gig economy, where there's a deep divide between people with permanent full-time jobs and those without. Well, that divide is visible in the present, too, so the story doesn't feel very far into the future at all.

About the author

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is the critically-acclaimed author of Signal to Noise — winner of a Copper Cylinder Award, finalist of the British Fantasy, Locus, Sunburst and Aurora awards — and Certain Dark Things, selected as one of NPR’s best books of 2016. She won a World Fantasy Award for her work as an editor. Prime Meridian is her first novella.