At the heart of this is unhealed Trauma. It's written so well that the techno-socioeconomic-landscape muddies the waters, covers the brokenness of many of the inhabitants of the city and in particular Amelia's world. She never had a chance to heal and to mourn. She had to shield herself, move within and then fight to survive outwardly through menial job after job including the Friendrr app. And yet, Amelia remained committed to her escape even through just the windows of her imagination. Every other thought inbetween the hopelessness of her situation was of Mars (not the silver screen Mars where one could wear pretty dresses outdoors and stroll out of cardboard prisons) the red planet where settlements lived in domes, drink recycled urine as liquid sustenance and worked to build the colonies.

Three Things:

⦁This book came out right on the cusp of the same technological advancements in our world, real-time. If that overpriced nonsense Apple VR at $3400 is any indication - we are hurtling towards this dystopian biotech future at breakneck speed. If global currencies and inflation are any indication - were more than half way there. Looking at you Turkey, and Argentina and heck too many to count.

⦁The relationship between Lucia and Amelia was almost maternal and gentle at times. Amelia probably witnessed her mother die after being her caregiver for 2 years. Although Lucia was a client, she was in an unspoken way, a pseudo-mom and pseudo-sister because as Mars is my witness, Martha was a colossal piece of trash.

⦁Amelia is inspiring...she didn't mess up and even if she did, she decided that she couldn't just give up and be one of the old women begging for a tajadero on the bus, she refused to. Sometimes, it seemed like a delusion, to save pennies upon pennies to get to Mars - but it was her lifeline. When Amelia was needed, she changed the course of her successful-life trajectory to be there for her dying mother. The cards she was dealt thereafter were Martha's cruel, conniving, callous cards. I hate Martha.

And there you have it. So, if we're moving to colonies on other planets. can I get a Class B Visa to Europa or Titan. I'm not down for living in a red space desert drinking recycled bodily fluids thanks.
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Well written, thematically sophisticated, frustrating as all hell to read. Moreno-Garcia's prose is a delight, and their characters are amazingly well developed. But the setting is seriously dystopic, and at this point in my life I'm really struggling with dystopias. Grinding poverty, the gig economy, and dreams of escape are woven together with multiple comparisons centring around our protagonist, Amelia - each of the people in Amelia's life show a stark contrast in one or more dimensions, which Moreno-Garcia uses to good effect. ( )

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.
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Neat story about a poor girl who dreams of going to Mars. It's set in Mexico, though the descriptions of places are focused more on the economic differences between the classes and less on the nation where the story is set. Also, I had trouble placing the timing of this one (it seems to maybe be historical sci-fi? Or maybe an alternate contemporary?) but it was still enjoyable.

Also, it didn't really take me as long to read it at the dates make it seem. I paused in reading this to read some readathon books before I ran out of time on the readathon. ( )

4 & 1/2 STARS

This third work I’ve read by Silvia Moreno-Garcia confirms that she’s an extremely versatile author: after the violent world of vampires shown in Certain Dark Things, and the frivolously vicious society of The Beautiful Ones, with this novella we explore Mexico in the near future, a future where mankind has established colonies on Mars while on Earth entire areas suffer from a failing economy, their inhabitants struggling in a hand-to-mouth existence that seems to offer little hope and even less means of escape.

Amelia is a prime example of this world: once a promising student winning a scholarship that might have launched her into an academic career, she was forced to abandon the university to tend to her ailing mother, so she now finds herself with no meaningful job credentials and is forced to work for an agency that offers friends for hire. The only escape she can envision is through her old dream of one day going to Mars, starting over in a world that looks new and promising despite its barrenness and hardships. But to get to Mars she needs money, and in the present circumstances there is little chance that she might hoard enough to fulfill her dream…

Prime Meridian is not what you might call a ‘proper’ science fiction story: there are no alien worlds to explore or extraordinary situations to face, but rather it’s a reflection on the all too possible course of development for our world, for the way in which certain social trends are going to evolve, and their consequences on individuals. What Moreno-Garcia accomplishes here, seemingly without effort, is to depict the lack of drive that could affect a society where opportunities are scarce and the dichotomy between the haves and haves-not has become an unsurmountable chasm, and quiet despair a way of life.

You can feel the latter quite clearly in Amelia’s day-to-day activities, her constant battle with too little money and too many demands on her time and energy. Still, it’s the dream of Mars – the only true element of science fiction here – that keeps her going, interspersed as it is with the recollections of a former B-movie actress who is one of Amelia’s clients: the fake Mars of a movie that never saw the light because of funding problems, and that exists only in a faded poster that hints at an almost impossible promise, is the vision which seems to anchor the young woman to her goal despite the constant strife and the subdued resentment one can perceive under her listless exterior.

The picture painted by this story is quite a vivid one, the characters coming to life through a few, well-placed brush strokes that leave you with the definite impression of having seen a movie, rather than read a book. Once again, Silvia Moreno-Garcia shows her flexibility as a storyteller, and the promise that the subjects of her works will always be unexpected and intriguing.



Originally posted at SPACE and SORCERY BLOG ( )