Meridiano Cero

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Un relato de la autora de Gótico.

Amelia sueña con Marte. El Marte de las películas y la imaginación, un bastión interminable de oportunidades para un colono con agallas. Pero está atrapada en Ciudad de México, soportando la monotonía de una metrópolis desagradable, trabajando como "amiga de alquiler", vendiendo su sangre a ancianos con dinero que esperan rejuvenecerse con ella, actuando en una historia de amor rota desde hace tiempo. Y, sin embargo, está Marte, tan lejos y tan cerca. Está segura de que la espera

Genres: Science Fiction, Novella, Fiction, Dystopia, Short Stories, Speculative Fiction, Adult

Audible Audio

First published December 1, 2017

About the author

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is the author of several novels, including Mexican Gothic, Gods of Jade and Shadow and The Daughter of Doctor Moreau. She has also edited a number of anthologies, including the World Fantasy Award-winning She Walks in Shadows (a.k.a. Cthulhu's Daughters). Mexican by birth, Canadian by inclination.

Reviews

[Genevieve Grace · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novella creeped me out. It was a snapshot of stymied dissatisfaction, a life arrested on its course and plunged by force into a stagnancy leading nowhere. If I sound overly flowery, like I'm trying to write a literary-sounding review of The Great Gatsby or some other profoundly uncomfortable classic work, it's because that's what Prime Meridian was like.

Only I don't need any American Lit teacher to tell me, "You see, Gatsby was so influential because it encapsulated the essence of the 1920s-" because I KNOW exactly what this novella is encapsulating. It's encapsulating the very stage of life I'm currently going through. As a 23-year-old who, at 18, had lofty, high hopes for my future and is now desperately trying to reel my off-track life back towards those hopes... like I said, Prime Meridian creeped me out. It's too real.

I would have given this novella at least three stars just for everything I've already mentioned. The fourth star is because it ended on a note of hope, saying that not all lost dreams are really lost. I was completely, one hundred percent expecting Prime Meridian to end in despair, or at least ambiguously -- but it didn't, and I love that.

[Rincey · Rating 3 out of 5]

My disappointment in this comes from two main things: 1) It's a novella and when I finished I wished I wanted it to be longer because I wanted all of it fleshed out more. 2) I definitely thought it took place in space (Look, I just auto-downloaded this because it's Silvia Moreno-Garica. I only like skimmed the summary.)

But man, you guys, Silvia Moreno-Garcia is always so freaking good at these morally gray, complicated characters. I can't get over it.

Watch me talk about this book in my December wrap up: https://youtu.be/ReIV4UHlHCI

[K.J. Charles]

I thought this would be a sf, but although it's set in a crumbling future when Mars colonisation is underway, it's mainly a portrait of a young woman in despair. Amelia dreams of Mars, sells plasma, scrabbles together a living as a professional friend and half-hearted mistress. Vivid, powerful writing in a fully realised world of grinding poverty and wealth gap. Amelia's bleakness, expressed in a detached inability to engage with her lover or sister, is powerfully done, and there is the faintest possible glimmer of hope at the end.

[Bethany (Beautifully Bookish Bethany) · Rating 5 out of 5]

A light sci-fi novella that feels more literary in scope and tone, Prime Meridian is about a young woman living in Mexico City, barely scraping by as a friend for hire and dreaming moving to Mars. While colonies on Mars are real, for Amelia they exist more as a dream of escape from the pain and mundaneness of her real life. This also plays with the ways in which films create this sort of dream-like escape that exists and doesn't exist all at once.

I love Moreno-Garcia's writing and I think this is a quick introduction to how she approaches storytelling and characterization. She often weaves speculative elements into books that are really driven by ideas and Mexican history. Her characters are usually unlikeable women surviving in a world that wants them to be something other than they are. Prime Meridian contains all of that.

[Fiona Knight · Rating 4 out of 5]

There was an expiry date to being a loser. You could make "bad choices" and muck about until you were around twenty-one, but after that, God forbid you committed any mistakes, deviating from the anointed path, even though life was more like a game of Snakes and Ladders than a straight line.
Amelia realized that anyone peering in would pass easy judgment on her. Stupid woman, too old to be stumbling through life the way she did, stumbling into her ex-boyfriend's apartment again, shrugging out of her jacket and staring out the window at the sign in the distance, which advertised Mars.
She could almost hear the voice-over: Watch Amelia act like a fool, again.
But not everyone got to be the Hero of the flick.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia has a real talent for connecting the reader to her characters; Prime Meridian is a short novella, but Amelia had me rooting for her from the beginning. Really, that's all you need in a story like this. And it doesn't hurt that its set in a near-future that's looking more and more like the present day, though it was written only five years ago.

Very worth checking out, for the atmosphere of Mexico City and, as mentioned, the main character Amelia, who might make interesting choices, but always understandable ones.

[Kristina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can always count on Silvia Moreno-Garcia to deliver on great writing and character driven stories. This novella was no exception. Despite those aspects of the story being strong, this was a little too bleak and melancholic for me. I do think she explored some interesting themes that many people will appreciate. Not my favorite of her works, but I'm always impressed with her authorial voice.

[Chelo Moonlight · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mentiría si no dijera que me ha resultado confuso…
Sigo leyendo a la autora por Gótico, pero no he vuelto a encontrar ningún libro suyo que me parezca que está al mismo nivel

[kari · Rating 4 out of 5]

That was not what I expected - at all. I thought I was in for a space exploration story. I got a powerful, emotional portrayal of precarious life in an enormous city, the suffocating weight of a number of tiny things gone wrong, disillusionment and dystopia that's become so commonplace no one sees it as such. All this contrasted with love of 80's movies in their endearing cheesiness. I thought I'd read just a couple of pages, and then I didn't stop reading until the very end.

[Silvia Moreno-Garcia]

A near-future science fiction novella. In audio, it's available as "Dreamlands," bundled together with a different novella (THE RETURN OF THE SORCERESS). So if you listen to books rather than read print or ebooks, there's that.

[Grapie Deltaco · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am incredibly selfish and wish this were full on 400 page book.

Despite this novella being short and quick, it explores so many topics without feeling overwhelming or rushed. I don't know how she does it.

In the not-too-distant future filled with a heavy reliance on cryptocurrency and new apps made for hiring "friends" by the hour, we follow Amelia in her day-to-day life in Mexico City and her unexpected and difficult reunion with a very particular ex.

Amelia dreams of moving her life to a post-colonized Mars and away from struggling to make ends meet in an overfilled job market and friends and family placing expectations on her she refuses to meet.

Despite taking place in the future, this short story very casually takes modern-day issues and amplifies them slightly with more advanced tech and pushes common issues within our societies to the forefront. With brief references to hologram assistants made in the form of teenage girls in revealing schoolgirl uniforms who are programmed to call the predominantly older male client base "master", nods to colorism in being pushed to pursue a partner with lighter skin and eyes, daily interactions between the working class and wealthy- highlighting the giant gap between the two, decisions constantly surrounding our main character revolving the selling of her body to varying degrees just to make ends meet, and the ongoing focus of one having to push off their dreams because of a lack of means and access, we see a common story that is already lived every day now.

It's a story of the same problems that plague so many of our own communities being placed in a slightly more technologically advanced version of our world.

I wish this story was so much longer but it doesn't feel incomplete.

CW: brief references to: sexual assault + pedophilia

[Rachel (TheShadesofOrange) · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.0 Stars
More contemporary than science fiction, this was more about the challenges of being an underemployed twenty-something living in Mexico. I liked the Mars colony angle and wished that it played a large role in the story. I particularly enjoyed the parts involving her working as a friend for hire (which is a real freelance job!)

[Adrian Dooley · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story of Amelia, a young woman who dreams of moving to Mars which has been colonised. She dreams of the reality of living with Mars and the romantic version in the old films depicting it.

But she is stuck scraping by on Earth in Mexico City, doing odd jobs here and there just to survive, living with her sister and her kids, she spends most of her days in coffee houses drinking the cheapest coffee while using their wifi.
An old boyfriend who broke her heart appears on the scene again and as she begins to see him again, even though he is engaged, she will not forgive him fr walking out without saying a word and wont let him get in the way of her ultimate dream of moving to Mars.

Not too much to say about this one. Not really a sci fi piece despite the setting. As a novella its short and sweet. the characters are mildly interesting but there isnt anything really profound or gripping about this book.

It passed a couple of hours with ease.

Many thanks to Netgalley, Innsmouth Free Press and Silvia Moreno-Garcia for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Teleseparatist · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find stories like this one strangely transfixing. The protagonist is a very young woman (though she is convinced that 25 is far older than it is) imprisoned in an untenably awful situation by external factors (poverty, economy, lack of family support) as well as internal ones (I'd say depression, and assorted problems related to that). It is a difficult and affecting read where little happens and even less is affected by the character herself: she reacts to events, and even the conclusion depends largely on external forces; and yet, there is hope in the end, and in survival against the odds.

I think I would have liked it better if the secondary characters (other than Lucía) had been given more humanity; the disconnect between the protagonist and them is believable, but I would have liked to see them a little more sympathetically, somehow despite the protagonist's limited perspective and biased opinions. But it was still very interesting and engrossing, and very well rendered.

[Rivqa · Rating 5 out of 5]

A novella of survival in a very real dystopia of later late-stage capitalism. But also a story of missed opportunities and second chances. Achingly beautiful.

[Laura Díaz]

Reseña completa en mi web: https://fantasyliterature.es/meridian...

Un libro extraño, sin una trama difícil pero con un mensaje que invita a la reflexión.

Meridiano Cero es un libro único, raro y profundamente reflexivo que nos plantea una pregunta poderosa: ¿hasta dónde llegarías si todo a tu alrededor estuviera condenado al fracaso, pero tus sueños siguieran aferrándose a la esperanza?
De la autora de Gótico, esta es una lectura corta, un poco incómoda pero intensa y llena de significado. Cruda y profundamente emocional, Meridiano Cero es ideal para quienes aman las historias diferentes, aquellas que dejan huella en el alma. Una obra para reflexionar sobre el poder de los sueños incluso en medio del caos.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Prime Meridian” and Its Many Marses

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “Prime Meridian” is about Mars, though not the red planet nor the Roman god of war. Instead, this story features a black-and-white Mars decorated with cheap studio effects, another Mars that exists only as a bond between a young couple that cannot survive the chasm of their inequity of wealth, and a third Mars that calls to Amelia’s soul from a billboard. Each Mars drives the plot and situates the story in terms of real world history, culture, and the history of science fiction.

In Moreno-Garcia’s near future, Mexico City’s wealthy exploit the despair of vast masses of disadvantaged youth in a hyper version of today’s gig economy. Amelia, our protagonist, abandoned her studies of urban agriculture to care for her ailing, dying mother and is saddled with ferrying her sister's children around in the bargain. Amelia calls herself a freelancer on her CV, noting it is a “euphemism for unemployed.” Her bleak possibilities recall Birdie’s options in Disch’s “Problems in Creativeness,” but what is at stake for Amelia is not the right of procreation but merely basic survival. At the story’s inception Amelia’s current gig is Friendrr, where lonely rich people pay her to be their friend for an hour, and her sole client is Lucía, once a “middling starlet” in 1960s Mexican cinema. From Amelia’s description, comparing her to “the core of a dead tree,” her house “artificial, too-calculated, too overdone” and her hospitality as generous as an infrequent dish of pomegranate seeds and glass of mineral water, our heroine clearly despises the ex-actress.

They watch Lucía’s second movie, dated 1965, which is set on Mars. At one point, Lucía says, “The real Mars is bland compared to the one the set designer imagined.” Amelia volunteers to the actress how she wants to go to the colonies. Amelia reinforces her wish in later conversations as well, but Moreno-Garcia underplays these exchanges, so the payoff at the story’s end is unexpected (at least to me it was.)

The author plants the story in the real world by amply seasoning the tale with Mexican culture. Lucía’s casona, for example, is plausibly placed in Coyoacán, the neighborhood where Frida Kahlo lived, where she was jailed after Leon Trotsky’s assassination. A wealthy ex-actress “who got lucky and married a filthy rich politician” who lived there certainly might decorate her home with colorful talaveras. Moreno-Garcia adds other recognizable elements—pulquerias, champurrado, esquite, rebozos, huipiles, and tinacos—but in Amelia’s world the pulquerias are being replaced by fusion restaurants, the huipiles are designer brands, and the rebozos are made in China. “Folkloric bullshit,” our protagonist opines, but these references illustrate the Swanwickian large, philosophical question of the story, the postcolonial effects upon the Mexican poor. The rich are free to enjoy Nahuan tamazcal in Peru, while the poor scrape by in purposeless hand-to-mouth existence.

Moreno-Garcia also reinforces her setting by adding real world references. Alejandro Jodorowsky and Luis Buñuel were active in Mexico’s film industry. In fact, Buñuel’s film Fando y Lis caused a riot in Acapulco. The producer of Lucía’s film, however, Nahum (Eduard) Landmann, is actually an inside joke, a reference to the “legendary founder” of Moreno-Garcia and Lavie Tidhar’s (who wrote the novella’s introduction) literary journal, The Jewish Mexican Literary Review (Tidhar).

In any case, Stanley Weinbaum (“A Martian Odyssey”) and A.E. Van Vogt (“The Enchanted Village”) would recognize Lucía’s Mars, because it is not Mars but “Mars. The moons are paper and the stars are tinfoil. So, it is possible to step forward [without a spacesuit].” The Mars of Lucías heyday is only for stories. It is the same Mars early SF stories were set, one for SF but not for science.

The Mars of the colonies is the same of the tender couple’s dreams, however rich Elías is bound to Earth. A creature of privilege, when he ghosts Ameli, he blames his father. Once he finds her on Friendrr, he transforms her into a willing, if unenthusiastic, whore. When she catches him in his stalking lie, he expresses regret saying, “I should have gone to New Panyu [a Martian colony] with you… My dad wouldn’t give me the money, but I should have done something.” Amelia compassionately offers him another chance, but at the story’s end, when Amelia announces her get-out-of-squalor-free card (Lucía’s gift), he chooses instead a boring life with Anastasia, the meat exhibition virtuoso. (“No offense, Amelia, but what do you know about art?”)

Moreno-Garcia’s story of income discrepancy is well founded in Mexico's current conditions. The author just tightened the screws already present a few more turns. According to its public site, Mexico City is the “eighth-richest urban agglomeration” and produces over a fifth of Mexico’s wealth, but its distribution of income is sinfully unequal. In 2010, Reyes, Teruel, and Lopez determined the truth was worse than the official numbers, demonstrating “the richest 1% of the population receives the same amount of income as the other 90%.” These people are rich enough to pay poor workers for an hour of cuddling, friendship, or even less savory duties.

Perhaps Elías did once dream of a life with Amelia in New Panyu, but when asked to choose, he chose the dream he already lives. “Cut the shit,” he tells her. “Come with me to Monterrey. I’ll rent a place for you there. I’ll pay your expenses.” He is offering her a long-term constant side gig until he gets bored again and ghosts her. Amelia, who despite misgivings of being a bad friend (though she cleans out her life savings for Pili), deserves more, and Lucia’s “shaky words… scrawled with a black felt pen” leave her no confusion. “Do what you want, Amelia,” they say. The gift transforms Amelia into the woman on the billboard, the “confident” girl who “knew things” (in numerous asides she recites Martian facts) and “knew people” (enough of them at least.) Through Lucía’s gift, she is ready for her final Mars, her exit from Mexico City. She may struggle, but after Mexico City’s grind, she is ready. The story’s satisfying conclusion, though the gift is unexpected, feels earned.

On Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s patron page, she describes her work as “magic realism, horror, fantasy and noir.” She also won a World Fantasy Award as editor for She Walks in Shadows. “Prime Meridian,” set in a near-future Mexico City with musical tattoos and “dancing, singing, 3D hologram[s] [of] teenage avatar[s] in a skimpy French maid’s outfit who… call you “Master” and wake you up in the morning with a song” recalls Williamson’s “With Folded Hands” perfect mechanicals, albeit with spicy upgrades. Read as a tale of a collection of Marses, it fits Zelazny’s SF definition too, but the story itself feels more like literary fiction. Moreno-Garcia adds a parallel aside, told in script form, which draws attention to the prose, and despite the protagonist’s enormous efforts to change her destiny, she is ever the target rather than the instigator of events. In any case, this is a thought-provoking story by a versatile author (Zombies!) and a fulfilling end to a semester of exploration.

[Olga Godim · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not really, no. The protagonist, Amelia, is trapped in Mexico City by poverty and hopelessness. She works low-paying jobs, she doesn’t have a profession, her education is unfinished, and her relationship with her only relative, her sister, is far from excellent. Bitter and angry, Amelia doesn’t like anything about her life. She hates the people surrounding her. She hates herself. She hates the city and the world, and she sees only ugliness everywhere. Unfortunately, that is as far as she goes. She doesn’t make any movement to change her situation, or anyone’s situation. She just complains, snarls, and endures.
Amelia would’ve kept to that pointless existence forever, paralyzed by her own impotent fury and incompetence, if a fairy godmother – actually an old actress for whom Amelia worked part-time – didn’t die and left Amelia a bit of money. Which finally spurred her into a tiny bit of action, a sort-of miniscule rebellion of her own. Sadly, the author stopped her narrative as soon as that happened.
I dislike characters like Amelia – whiny, self-absorbed, lazy pricks.
I dislike the literary device called deus ex machina, where all the hero’s problems are solved by someone else – a god, a boss, an inheritance, etc.
Consequently, I didn’t like this novella. I found no pleasure in reading it and felt faintly dirty afterwards.
Besides, the entire piece feels like a backstory, a prelude to what might happen to Amelia after the inheritance. If I were this author’s writing teacher, I’d have marked this story an F and sent her back to write the true story of Amelia. The only purpose of the current story: it could serve as Amelia’s original character sketch.
But I’m only a reader, so I rate this book low and forget it.

Note: The cover proclaims this story as sci-fi, but it reads more like a dystopia. There are no sci-fi elements in this tale, except that the protagonist dreams of traveling to Mars, which is being colonized. But that exciting topic is far outside the scope of this book.

[Hank]

DNF 25% The writing is terrible, it feels like a teenager learning how to drive a car with a clutch. I think Moreno-Garcia is just not for me.

[Shannon · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.25

A very good novella but I think I will almost always have the same problem: if I'm enjoying the story I will inevitably wish for more.

Also wasn't a huge fan of the script parts interspersed, as I'm not sure they added much overall.

[imyril is not really here any more · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think I have something in my eye. What a brilliant, forceful story.

Full review to follow.

I received a free copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

[A Reader's Heaven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love, life, dreams, and a world beyond reach.
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.

I have to start by saying this was NOT what I was expecting when I started reading. The story of Amelia is hopeful and heartbreaking at the same time. Amelia lives in Mexico City - but dreams of Mars. She has wants to step foot on Mars and make it her home now that it has been colonised. Lots of her waking hours are spent going from one coffee house to the next, taking advantage of their free wi-fi to look up articles on Mars and other science-based issues.

She dreams of how exciting it will be compared with her mundane life she leads right now in Mexico City. She flits from one job to the next, unable to secure a good job due to her lack of education. She is a professional friend, a blood donor, and a part-time mistress of a previous boyfriend (who is now engaged to be married!). She lives with her sister and her kids because she can't afford anything better. She is forced to be the babysitter whenever her sister needs to go somewhere. Amelia (I think) is depressed and doesn't have the tools or the income to do anything about that. It is tough, it is gritty and it is a situation I think a lot of people can relate to.

What else is there? Secondary characters are really non-existent in this book - apart from the now-engaged ex-boyfriend Elias, and the wonderful Lucia, who Amelia visits as a "Rent-A-Friend". Elias is a jerk and very unlikeable (for me, anyway) but Lucia is really the star of the show here (as far as secondary characters.) She is a former queen of the screen, doing sci-fi films that did have a Mars connection. At first, Amelia just sits and listens as Lucia tells her the story of her life but, as the story progresses, the bond between the two of them becomes more than just a rent-a-friend.

But under all of that depression and drifting is Amelia's hope - to visit Mars. It is what keeps driving her, keeps her taking whatever source of income she can to inch her ever closer to fulfilling that dream. Although Amelia isn't totally likeable, the reader can't help but hope for a better future for her...

Highly recommended!


Paul
ARH

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prime Meridian is a lovely, quiet science fiction novella.

Amelia is a lonely woman, drifting through an unsatisfying life in Mexico City. She’s wound up living with her bossy older sister and her two nieces in one cramped apartment, while she works a series of odd temp jobs, mostly as someone rich people can hire to be their friend.

But Amelia has dreams. She dreams of Mars. Becoming a Martian colonist requires resources that are far out of Amelia’s grasp, but she’s never given up on the dream.


“Adrift” is the perfect description of Amelia. She spent her entire childhood studying hard to get a college scholarship, and then she lost it when she had to leave to care for her sick mother. Now her mother’s dead and Amelia’s unemployable. The class divide in this novella is stark. Soon after the beginning of the novella, Amelia reconnects with an old boyfriend, who she went to college with. He’s wealthy and seems interested in her… but he’s also got a fiancee.

One of the things that struck me the most about Prime Meridian was Amelia’s job as a Rent-a-Friend. It’s utterly terrible that you could hire someone to be your friend… but I also believe it’s a startup that could really happen. Apparently something like it already has? Anyway, Amelia’s not that charismatic or good-looking, so she has trouble finding work even as a fake friend. Pretty much her only client is an old woman who used to be an actress, before she gave it up and married a rich man. She hires Amelia to watch her old movies with her.

So many of the movies are set on Mars. Not the real, scientific Mars, but the dream of Mars. The B-movie, pulpy, spacemen and aliens Mars. The sections of the novella were divided up by excerpts from these movies scripts, and they play a large role in the story. This whole tale is about Mars as a dream and an escape, so of course the depiction on the silver screen ties into that.

Prime Meridian isn’t really about Mars. It’s about Mars as a dream, a hope, and a chance. Amelia wants out of unfulfilling life. Would Mars really be any better? Maybe not, but having hope is better than nothing.

Prime Meridian is a haunting novella that swept me away with its dream of Mars.

I received an ARC in exchange for a free and honest review.

Review from The Illustrated Page.

[The Captain · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ahoy there me mateys!  This be the sixth book I have read by the author and me sixth five star read.  Dang does she float me boat!  I have said before that what I find amazing about all of the author's books is that they feel so different from each other.  The first was a vampire story with stunning vampire culture and history.  The second was a Mayan fairy-tale set during the Jazz age in Mexico.  The third was a romance with a hint of fantasy set in the Belle Époque era.  The fourth was a coming-of-age thriller set in Baja California in 1979.  The fifth was a gothic horror set in 1950s Mexico.

This was a novella set in Mexico City in a near-future.  Amelia is 25 and her dream of getting to Mars is a strong as ever even if her once bright future has grounded to a halt.  Life has become so bleak and Amelia is eking out her existence with odd jobs.  One of those jobs is as a rent-a-friend.  She isn't popular and one of her few regular "friend" jobs is with an aging movie star watching the woman's old films.  How these films relate to the larger themes are lovely.

The real allure in this story is the starkness of Amelia's life and the pain of the environment that Amelia lives in.  It just feels so real and gritty.  Her desperation for another life combined with watching her slowly shrivel up with each bad break is heart-wrenching.  One can't help but completely understand Mona's bitterness and anger while still wishing for her to not give up and fight for herself.  The ending was bittersweet and yet I still hope it all turns out okay.  A beautifully painful and touching book that I do very much recommend.

I absolutely love Silvia Moreno-Garcia and can't wait for whatever she writes next.  Arrr!

[Megan Hex · Rating 5 out of 5]

Basically a science fiction novel placed right now. The hope of Mars is a backdrop against the hardscrabble life of twentysomethings stuck in a gig economy. Sad and truthful without ever quite losing hope. It's a novella, so take a couple hours and read this one.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

(I received an early ebook copy of this book from the publisher through Netgalley. My opinions are my own)

Wow. I had no expectations going into this. I knew three things: the cover was gorgeous, it was listed as Sci-Fi, and the main character wanted to go to Mars.

What I got was leagues above and beyond.

The first thing you should know is this is a quick, fast paced story. It's written in the clipped, straightforward style reminiscent of the Lost Generation. This does not mean the writing is not beautiful and full of precious gems (it very much is). Ideally what I want you to understand here is, you don't need to commit yourself to an epic, sweeping tale. You can sit down on a rainy afternoon in a coffeeshop and take out half of it. It will leave you looking at that coffee shop and rainy afternoon a little differently.

I wont go into too much detail about the story because my lack of expectation is what made it so enjoyable for me.

What I will say is that it is full of hope. Hope, and want, and the power of decision. If you are feeling lost in your life, this is a story for you.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sad and rather pointless story of a young woman in a future Mexico City, her on-again, off-again boyfriend, big-city angst, and her desire to move to the Mars colony. 2.5 stars, rounded down because, well, I just didn't like Amelia (the MC) very much. But your mileage may vary: see other reviews.

I read the reprint in The Dozois Year's Best #35 (and last).

[Cheryl · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really misleading cover and blurb. The only thing SF about it, in actuality, is the near-future dystopia. And yes, I admit, it is a dystopia because even though there are still plenty of rich ppl, they have no souls. But honestly if I hadn't seen the cover, I would have been able to tell that the blurb overpromised, and I would not have read this. Ugh.

[dovesnook · Rating 4 out of 5]

I might add to this later, but all I have to say now is that I’m not even a huge sci-fi fan and this was so damn good. There were some dystopian elements and a whole lot of subtle social commentary. I wish it was a full length novel!

[Bogi Takács]

Review soonish IY"H! I should say in the meanwhile that I liked it.

Source of the book: Bought with my own money

[Mike Finn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A novella about a young woman in a future Mexico City deciding what to do about her dreams after her well-planned life has been derailed.


In 'Prime Meridian', Silvia Moreno-Garcia shows us a young woman, Amelia, trying to shape her life, to make the right choices after having been knocked off course from a career planned to take her to Mars when she had to drop out of college to look after her sick mother.


The story is set in a near-future Mexico city with some interesting extrapolations of current trends: gangs taking over the entrance to train stations for a day a charging commuters an admission fee; a rich elite living in a parallel world to everyone else; a lack of job opportunities pushing people into taking up roles as paid stalkers or, like our heroine, selling blood or selling her time on Friendrr, a service where people pay her to sit with them while they talk to her about their lives as if she was their best friend.


'Prime Meridian' is the kind of speculative fiction that is set in the future not so much as a prediction of where we are going but as a change in the surface manifestation of things to allow us to see ourselves and our choices more clearly. By setting her characters in a familiar but slightly changed environment which offers different choices and constraints, Silvia Moreno-Garcia shows us that our hopes and fears and loves and hatreds do not change fundamentally from one era to the next but remain the constants that energise us. That energy is shaped by the choices and constraints we have in front of us.


This idea is reinforced by interspersing the main narrative with the script of a (very) low-budget space adventure set on Mars where the setting has very little impact on THE HERO and the woman SPACE EXPLORER. She also gives Amelia an elderly Friendrr client who, in her youth, played the female lead in those kinds of movies. Both the script and the actress say to Amelia:


'There are only two plots. You know them well. A person goes on a journey or a stranger comes into town.'


In this story, it has always been Amelia's intention to go on a journey, to head out to a new life on Mars. Mars is a symbol of transformation as a new start for colonists but Mars is also as the setting for a so-awful-it's-an-art-form bimbos-in-fur-bikinis SF movie that was the brightest moment in the life of Amelia's elderly actress client, I think this means that Mars is both the physical planet and a metaphor for the pursuit of the extraordinary.


The central problem Amelia has is, should she / can she follow her dream and go to Mars? This becomes a problem of identity for Amelia. Now that she's not an on-track-to-a-career student, who is she? Who should she be?


Is Amelia the person she dreamt she would be or is she the dreamer whose dreams were partly shaped by who she knew she was not and by things she knew she could not have?


Amelia stumbles towards the question of her own identity by reflecting on the changes in her ex-lover. She says:


He did not appear older most days, but that morning, he was his full 25 years, older still, not at all the boy she’d gone out with. He’d looked very much the Hero when she’d first spotted him and now he did not seem the Villain, but he could not save maidens from dragons or girls from space pirates. He had settled into the man he would be. That was what she saw that morning. Whom had she settled into? Had she?


He is the man who was her lover when they were both at college, dreaming of who they would like to be if they were not who they were. He, a rich man's son with dynastic duties, she a scholarship student with a sick mother.


As she considers her own failure to change, it seems to Amelia that:


'There was an expiry date to being a loser. You could make “bad choices” and muck about until you were around twenty-one, but after that, God forbid you committed any mistakes, deviating from the anointed path, even though life was more like a game of Snakes and Ladders than a straight line.'"


We watch Amelia slide back towards this man, more from inertia than choice, until one day she thinks to herself:


'I think I'm becoming a professional mistress.'


We see her considering the route taken by the elderly but rich former actress who tells her of her own choice:


'So, I cashed in my chips and married well. I thought it was more dignified than shaking my ass in a negligee until the cellulite got the better of me and they kicked me off the set.'


Slowly, carefully, Amelia decides on who she is going to be and what plot she is going to follow.


I found this to be a thoughtful and engaging story with people who seemed real to me making the kind of choices we all have to make in one way or another.


It made me think about the title, 'Prime Meridian'. Clearly, it's meant to be a science fiction-ish title even though the story is more about an interior dialogue. So, why 'Prime Meridian' rather than SPACE EXPLORER or MARS as used in the script? I think it's because the Prime Meridian, the line of longitude that marks the division between East and West, is unlike the equator, entirely a matter of convention. It is wherever we all agree it is. Perhaps there is a message here that, before she can get her life back in motion, Amelia needs to define her own Prime Meridian, a reference point against which she can measure her progress.