Cover Image: Prime Meridian

Prime Meridian

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I love the range Silvia Moreno-Garcia has in her writing and how distinct each book feels from the others. The one common thread often seems to be women longing for something seemingly just out of their reach. In this novella, a woman working in the gig economy as a rent-a-friend is obsessed with the possibility of moving to the Mars colony one day. Despite not having the money and despite everyone in her life telling her it's a useless fantasy, Amelia is determined. I really appreciated that this was all about the journey, not the destination. We never see Amelia reach Mars. We never even see her on a spaceship. This story is all about longing and striving toward a goal rather than some grand adventure. That might make it less exciting than a lot of the science fiction we see today, but that's actually what I loved about it. Prime Meridian stands out from the crowd.

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This was a surprise. I really enjoyed it but didn't know what to expect at all. I think Amelia is what Jazz from Andy Weir's Artemis would be like if instead of living on the moon colony she was stuck on Earth dreaming of living on the moon colony. Except she is written so much better, like so so much better. It was a quick read and an enjoyable one, which feels weird to say considering the life Amelia leads. If you like dystopian, near-future sci-fi and don't mind a bleak read, give this a go.

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This book is not standard new-adult science fiction, but a well-written, and touching story in a, quite possible to happen, dystopian future.
Amelia is a heart-warming, relatable and real heroine. The theme of a woman giving her best and even tough being taken for granted is shown in detail (I found the symbolism with the rat very clever) and the heroine arc is lovely.
I hope there are more books with Amelia's life on Mars and will be checking out future books by this author.

I would like to thank NetGalley and Innsmouth Free Press for providing me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

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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.

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This novella length story set in a future where we have traveled to and colonized Mars is packed full of the desperation that many are feeling right now. It is the story of a young woman who put everything she dreamed of on hold to care for a sick parent, then never was able to pick it back up again after that parent passed, with a sister who takes her presence for granted, but tries to make her feel like the leech. It is the story of a woman who finally takes her life back, with help from an unexpected source, in spite of everyone trying to convince her it's a bad idea, for their own reasons, not hers.


While I cannot say this was a fun read, if you are expecting a sci-fi story about Mars, this is not the place, it was well done and evokes the emotions that the character is feeling so well. Your heart just aches for Amelia, who can never seem to win, and constantly does for others, only to be chastised and unappreciated at every turn.


I gave this a 4/5, and look forward to reading more from Silvia Moreno-Garcia. I was very affected by the slice of a life she crafted here.

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Amelia wants nothing more than to go to Mars. Unfortunately right now, she can't afford it. She does a variety of odd jobs, such as a rent-a-friend program to raise money in the meantime.

Moreno-Garcia's characters are always interesting, and she places them in rich, vibrant surroundings. So far I've loved everything I've read from her.

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I loved the slice of life feel this had. The story is about day to day problems like unemployment, exboyfriends and strangled family relationships. The sci fi touches were very realistic, like the Friendr app could be real at any point. Also it felt depressing but with the economic crisis it isn't far fetched that a lot of cities would end up like the one in this book. The worldbuilding and descriptions were amazing but I wish we had seen more about the rest of the characters. The main character came accross as trapped and selfish and desperate, which I loved, but it also meant getting no input from other characters. All in all fantastic.

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I’m not sure what exactly I was expecting – but it wasn’t this. Less escapist space opera and far more dystopian, very-near-future, this novella packed a punch. I’ll be honest – given what else was going in my life, this was not the read I would have chosen to pick up. But I’m glad I did.

Amelia has edges – and quite right, too. So would I if I’d endured the lack of opportunity and dead-end options facing her. She has fixated on going to Mars – right from the time she was old enough to be ambitious and despite having had a series of unlucky breaks, she still is determined to get there. It’s the only thing that really matters… so it is painful to read of her constant struggles that seem to go nowhere. She is constantly angry and hostile to those around her – not ideal when one of her hard-scrabble jobs is to sell her companionship in response to an app.

The world is richly depicted – which seems to be Moreno-Garcia’s trademark, along with indepth characterisation that doesn’t impede the storyline. She nearly has the pacing nailed, but I did feel the ending was a tad hurried in comparison to the rest of the story. Having said that, novellas are fiendishly difficult to get right.

I enjoyed the story and the awkward dynamic between Amelia and the rest of the characters. The times when she is most at peace with herself and those around her, are when thinking of Mars, or watching the movies with an ageing actress who employs her to listen to her past. And if you think that sounds rather poignant, you’d be right.

I would love to read a sequel to this thought-provoking story as I find myself wondering about the character and what happens next. Recommended for fans of literary fiction. While I obtained an arc of Prime Meridian from the publisher via Netgalley, the opinions I have expressed are unbiased and my own.
9/10

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Amelia is a near-future equivalent of a millennial. Forced to quit school to take care of her ailing mother, she gets by living with her sister, doing "Friendrr" gigs, and selling her blood. It's a bleak life. When her wealthy ex-boyfriend comes around, things may be looking up, but he turns out to be engaged to someone else. Amelia has few prospects for a job, a career, or marital happiness, but she holds out home to, one day, go to Mars.


Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Prime Meridian is a thin little book, in more ways than one. Nothing about Amelia made me want to cheer her on in her dream to go to Mars. I don't think I would even want to hang out with her. I felt a little sorry for her, that she had to take care of her dying mother, and that she and her sister have such a bad relationship. But she mostly came across as a whiny victim, certainly not as a heroine.


Moreno-Garcia paints a believable picture of the near future world of Mexico City in all its gritty, miserable reality. Her subtle references to social trends, mores, and lifestyle give a sense of despair and hopelessness, but Amelia retains hope in the midst of this that she will get to Mars. This is an interesting little book in some ways, but I didn't like it all that much.


Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!

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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.

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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

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Silvia Moreno-García aprovecha un escenario de futuro cercano para contar una historia de frustración y lucha contra la adversidad que podría estar aconteciendo ahora mismo en el edificio de al lado.

Prime Meridian es el nuevo comienzo de Amelia, una joven mejicana que mira hacia la colonización de Marte como su única salida de una vida condenada a la mediocridad y la pobreza. Pero incluso ese viaje está fuera de sus posibilidades.

La autora relata con toda crudeza la situación de status quo irresoluble en la que se ven atrapados muchos jóvenes, sin posibilidades de avanzar pero con el miedo a retroceder aún más en la endeble escalera de la economía. Es difícil calificar esta obra como ciencia ficción, porque no tiene apenas elemento especulativo, y el viaje a Marte se podría haber sustituido fácilmente por cualquier otro mítico El Dorado inalcanzable. Lo que sí se puede decir sobre Prime Meridian es que su verosimilitud es su principal baza y también su principal amenaza. Su personaje protagonista no despierta empatía, ni siquiera en su trabajo como "amiga profesional" consigue conectar con las personas a las que presta servicio, pero aún así nos sirve para hacer una reflexión poderosa sobre las metas que tenemos en la vida y que esperamos cumplir.

Me gusta la representación de la ciudad de Méjico como un hervidero de actividad en el que los humanos se pierden como gotas entre los intersticios de la mano, consigue darle más credibilidad a la historia.

No es una obra que recomendaría al lector que vaya buscando ciencia ficción al uso porque no es lo que va a encontrar. Pero si que es una obra que merece la pena leer.

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Despite the space cover and the SF theme the star of this book is the relationships. I particularly enjoyed Amelia. She is a complex believable character. I thought the other characters were a bit rougher but it is a novella. I am also glad Silvia Moreno-Garcia brought some of her Mexican heritage into this novella as it always gives her stories an enjoyable uniqueness. I wasn't blown away but it was an enjoyable read.

Thanks to NetGalley for a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

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I got an ARC copy of Prime Meridian from Net Galley and loved it. It is a fantastic novella (what are my reading habits coming too?).

Prime Meridian is a really light type of sci-fi. There’s no robots, no space ships, no aliens, just a city that is disenfranchised by technology and money, as people scrape and struggle to make ends meet. It’s a sci-fi that blends the now and the future, but that you can easily imagine the tipping point as we fall forward into prioritizing the wealthy over the poor.

Amelia dreams of going to Mars. But there are different tiers of access to Mars, where rich people can pay their way to join the colony but the poor go as indentured servants. She has no hope but to continue working menial, minor jobs in order to maybe one day save enough. I loved the concept of Friendr, which is obviously based on Fiverr. I’ve used Fiverr before and really dislike it. It does weird things to the psyche in my opinion when you’re trying to make money in a system that devalues your labour.

But ultimately this is a novella about relationships and loneliness. Moreno-Garcia does a really good job at creating the character relationships and made me cry at the end (which was awkward since I was reading this at work). This is the second book by Moreno-Garcia that I’ve read and I’m constantly impressed by her work. I will definitely be picking up more books by her.

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Great story strong on character development, less so on science fiction

I enjoyed this book. Although science fiction plays a role in the backdrop of the story, this novella is about people. It has very strong character development and the settings are described very well. These far outweighed the lack of science fiction and this book was a thoroughly entertaining one. It is well worth the read.
Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book via Netgalley for review purposes.

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First off, I have to admit that I was going through a weird reading slump when I picked up this novella, so it took way longer for me to read than it should have. It is short, but the pacing is very slow, so it's probably a book to read when you've got the patience to hang around and wait for the payoff. I do think the ending was worth it.

We follow Amelia, a bright 20-something, down on her luck in a near-future Mexico City. She had to drop out of college to care for her ailing mother, and having lost that opportunity, the economic realities of her situation are pretty dire. There seems to be no path forward to a respectable career for her anymore, and yet she cannot let go of her long-standing dream of emigrating to a colony on Mars.

Amelia's interactions with a variety of people in her social orbit form the focus of this novella, most importantly two clients who hire her through an app Amelia uses to offer her services as a professional friend. The first is an elderly former actress named Lucía, who hires Ameila to watch her old films with her, including one terrible, campy space flick set on Mars. The second is a super-wealthy ex-boyfriend of Amelia's who dumped her at the request of his father and has now located her again via the friend app. He's a pretty useless human being, but Amelia allows herself to be dragged back into an ill-defined sexual relationship with him, more out of economic desperation than anything else.

Though distant at the start, Lucía gradually reveals more of her own life to Amelia, and there is a through-line involving a version of the Mars film that never got made, in which the female character was to be an intrepid space explorer instead of a damsel in distress, with a story that was hers and not someone else's. As I said, the ending was great, even if it takes some patience with the casual, meandering desperation of Amelia's world to get there.

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Just a quick note, this book is technically already out if you were one of the backers for the author's IndieGoGo, if not this one does not come out until this summer. I was lucky to receive a copy from Netgalley in exchange for my honest review.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is becoming a fast favorite author of mine. I like that she writes about younger adults (mid-20s to older) so it makes it easier for me, a 27-year-old, to relate to her characters. I like that with Amelia she writes a really lost character that just doesn't know where to go with her life. I think that is natural to feel that way, but I think our society tells us that we are supposed to have our whole life figured out. Amelia is also kind of cold and unlikeable, which I find interesting. The text in this novella even has a conversation between her and another character about how, "some people are just not meant to be liked." I find this concept to be really interesting.

I have to admit that this novella was just not what I was expecting. I do think since it deals with how technology affects society it should still be counted as a Sci-Fi book, but we never actually see Mars in the story. I think that is kind of the point. In the story, Amelia finds work on an app called Frendrr and has frequent booking with an old actress named Lucia. Lucia says to Amelia, "There are only two plots...A person goes on a journey and a stranger comes into town." This book isn't about Amelia's life on Mars, this is about her journey to get there.

Moreno-Garcia has this incredible knack for just painting the setting inside my head with her words. Like Signal to Noise, I felt like I could really see the city that Amelia lives it. You could really feel the bleakness of the world and the subtle way in how it has turned into a dystopia. It's very slight with just a few sentences here and there to show the economic depression and how everyone is struggling to survive. I like a good near-future story that is just close enough to current day. It makes it feel more real and believable.

I think if you liked Moreno-Garcia's other books you would enjoy this one. Since it's a novella it's also shorter and a quicker read to get through.

*I received a free egalley copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

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Thanks to NetGalley for this copy of Prime Meridian.

I was eager to read something by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and this novella hasn't disappointed me at all. The money issues, gigs and precariousness as the setting of the story is very relatable to the millennial generation, especially to those who live in countries deeply struck by the economic crisis. Amelia, the main character forced to struggle with a toxic family and a very difficult social situation. The huge gap between the rich and the poor. The selfishness, the reification of the people without resources, the injustice and insecurity, the weight of distress and the unknown future. Every of these issues is present on the book; but, over all, there are Mars and the hope of a better life.

With a dynamic, casual but very evocative prose, Moreno-Garcia tells us a very deep story about world's hardship and how sometimes our dreams can stop us or tie us up, but can also protect us from decisions that would mean a final surrender. In Prime Meridian, clinging to your dreams is the only act of rebellion allowed by a society that seems to be shouting: “If you have nothing, resignation is the only way to survive.”

This is a great story, with great characters and a great structure as well. It’s divided in blocks of two chapters intertwined with little "interludes" that emulate the style of a movie script, mirroring Amelia's path through the plot. Because cinema is another of the most important elements of the book, and it acts like a bridge between dreams and reality.

5/5 to Prime Meridian, because it manages to tell in a very sharp, clever way everything the author wanted to tell us.

Full review (in Spanish) in La Nave Invisible.

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Amelia works as a rent-a-friend, spending time with others in exchange for a little money in her pocket. All the while, she dreams of mars and a life different from her own. This was more of a short-story than a novel. I didn't get a real feel for the characters. The entire book felt bleak, making it feel as if it was going nowhere. Overall, not a book for me.

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Really interesting short story. Near-future, recognizable places and tech. Sympathetic characters. Excellent prose and pacing. Fantastic introduction to Moreno-Garcia's writing. Can't wait for more.

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