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= Prime Meridian (novella) = Prime Meridian is a novella by Mexican-Canadian author Silvia Moreno-Garcia with an introduction by Lavie Tidhar. It was first self-published by Moreno-Garcia in December 2017 via her imprint Innsmouth Free Press. It was widely released in July of 2018. The eBook and the Kindle Edition were released in 2018, both by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc. It follows the life of Amelia in near-future Mexico City who dreams of escaping the drudge of everyday life by traveling to the colonies established on Mars.

Reception
Prime Meridian was well-received. An article in Locus magazine, an award-winning sci-fi, horror, and fantasy publication, gives Prime Meridian “the highest recommendation.” The same article names it one of the best novellas in recent years. Prime Meridian was included in a previous article on the same site: the “2017 Locus Recommended Reading List.” The novella was also named recommended in The Mary Sue’s article, “Books off the Beaten Path: 15 Small Press Reads If You Want Something Different.” Lastly, it was included in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection by Gardner Dozois.

Plot Summary
The story follows Amelia and her plight as a low-income, college dropout who barely makes ends meet by selling her plasma and working as a part-time rent-a-friend. Burdened with the task of looking after her sister’s children, and drowning in the hopeless drudge of everyday life, Amelia dreams of traveling to the colonies established on Mars if only she could save enough money. Seemingly cemented into her station in life, both physically and socioeconomically, Amelia’s tale is inevitably one of hope and enduring.

Amelia
Amelia is the main character of the novel. She is a part-time rent-a-friend who sells her plasma for extra cash. She had to drop out of college to take care of her mother and was never able to return. She’s young, angry, and running on the fumes of her dream to escape her life and live on the colonies established on Mars.

Lucía Madrigal
Amelia describes Lucía as an aging starlet who married a man with money. She pays Amelia to spend time with her via the rent-a-friend app, Friendrr. Lucía uses their time together to show Amelia the movies she acted in during the Golden Age of Mexican cinema.

Fernanda
Fernanda is a friend of Amelia’s from college. Unlike Amelia, she’s from money and is married to a rich politician. Amelia has had to ask to borrow cash from her before.

Marta
Marta is Amelia’s older sister. She has several children, no husband, and lives with Amelia in their mother’s old apartment. She uses Amelia to take care of her kids and for her contribution to the rent.

Elías Bertoliat
Elías Bertoliat is Amelia’s ex-boyfriend. They met while they were both in college and fell in love. Amelia was greatly hurt when he broke up with her and left without saying goodbye.

Miguel
Miguel is Amelia’s “broker” within the Friendrr app. His full title is Junior Social Appointment Broker. He manages the appointments Amelia keeps with clients and weeds out any potentially unsavory characters that may solicit her services.

Anastasia Brito
Anastasia is another acquaintance from college. She’s snotty and well-off. She’s an artist with a gallery in the wealthier part of Mexico City.

Class
In the novella, Amelia occupies a low socioeconomic status, and all her wants, wishes, and needs are delimited by it. Moreno-Garcia emphasizes Amelia’s situation by juxtaposing her with her old college friends and boyfriend who she describes as “those ‘excellent’ people,” (12). Amelia admits she was only counted among them because she wrote essays for Fernanda, and therefore made herself “useful.” Her status in the eyes of her college friends was raised marginally when she dated Elías Bertoliat, who “with his pale skin and light eyes, and his fancy car, seemed like a prince from a fairy tale” (18). Moreno-Garcia puts a finer point on her precarious circumstances: “to be frank, just a couple of bad turns and Amelia would be begging in the subway…”(16).

Pili, perhaps Amelia’s only true friend, engages in unspecified criminal activity in order to make ends meet. When she is arrested, Amelia doesn’t hesitate to dip into her scant savings to bribe the cops (52). At a get together at Pili’s apartment, Amelia overhears an anecdote that is familiar to many of her and Pili’s age and class: “Everyone had a story like that. They’d all done better at one point. They’d run better cons, done better drugs, drunk better booze, but now they were skimming”(44). Amelia doesn’t seem inclined to take part in these activities, but only because if her police record was not clear she would not be allowed to go to Mars.

Amelia showcases awareness, which her position necessitates, of socioeconomic disparity on a larger scale as well. For her job with Friendrr, she visits a place she describes as both a “luxurious” residence and “monstrous buildings” (24). Working and lower-class people lived in the shadows of these “behemoths,” and “Since the expensive buildings required abundant water and electricity, the poor residents in the area had to do without” (24). Amelia lingers on the image of these buildings and their effects on lower-class citizens, noting that the poor built their homes just three blocks away from trendy spas that catered to the people in the towers.

Technology in Society
Throughout the story, Moreno-Garcia peppers in different new technologies and practices, some real and some projected. On the subway, an old woman begs for tajaderos—a new form of cryptocurrency worth more than the Mexican peso. Amelia sells her “blood to old farts who paid for expensive transfusions, thinking the plasma could rejuvenate them”(13). The app Friendrr, which currently has no real-life, mainstream equivalent, is Amelia’s main source of revenue. Amelia describes advertisements for virtual assistants, “ dancing, singing, 3D hologram[s]: teenage avatar in a skimpy French maid’s outfit who would call you “Master” and wake you up with a song,” not unlike Gatebox (31). On the streets, Amelia passes virtual reality arcades, the scale of which current technology and demand have not yet matched. Pili notes that these arcades are likely to be shut down due to “virtual reality dissociation,” and addiction but only because the “Mayor” needed to gain support from constituents (37). Vat-meat, although never specified, shares similarities with lab-grown meat with a repulsive twist. Vat-meat is protested by eco-activists in the novella, but Amelia has no interest in what they advocate only in spending the least on meals. An old college “friend,” Anastasia Brito, stages an art show using vat-meat that produces a particularly vivid image of it: “There were hunks of beef hanging from the ceiling, cube-shaped meat that gently palpitated. Alive. Vat-meat, coerced into this shape”(39).

Love
Amelia’s love for Elías Bertoliat turned hateful during the time after he ghosted her. But, when he re-entered her life she found herself wrestling with her feelings for him again. Elías requested Amelia’s services via Friendrr, inviting her up to his skyscraper residence. Amelia notes the changes between the Elías she knew and the one who “ordered [her] like you order Chinese takeout” (33). Amelia and he dreamed of going to Mars together, they learned the three main languages in the colonies together starting with “I love you.” In their first encounter, “She was being deliberately cruel, teasing him. She disliked it when she sank to such depths, but Amelia was angry,” and nothing he did or said made her any less mad. But, Amelia soon finds out, she plays two roles: the jilted lover and the other woman. Elías is engaged to be married, but he loves Amelia. Amelia loves Mars. Even while she lingered in her affair with Elías, “there were moments when she pretended this was New Panyu because she had never seen it, so it could be” (78). New Panyu is the largest settlement on Mars.

Mars
Mars is Amelia’s ultimate life goal and a pipe dream. It takes money to go to Mars, money she can’t hope to save up while also trying to live. Amelia’s dream is an echo of a centuries-long human fascination with, and study of, Mars. Since the discovery of what initially looked like channels, mistranslated as “canals,” Mars has snagged the imagination of Science Fiction writers and readers. Before this idea of canals, popularized by Percival Lowell, was later debunked it took on a life of its own. Construction of canals pointed to intelligent life on Mars and it was the possibility of an ancient civilization and its descendants surviving on a dying planet that took root in 20th-century minds. However, Moreno-Garcia was less interested in the possibility of alien life than she was in the life already on Earth. She turns the image of a far-off dying planet on its head, returning the reader’s focus to not only an ailing Earth but also to the vulnerable people that ecological deterioration impacts the most. It is at once a warning and a seed of hope for the future.

Despite her focus on life on Earth, Moreno-Garcia does not miss an opportunity to point toward the long history of Mars in the public eye throughout. Amelia never really stops thinking about Mars and has a habit of rehashing her immense knowledge of the planet:

“Mars is home to the tallest mountain in the solar system. Olympus Mons, 21 km high and 600 km in diameter, she told herself as the driver honked the horn. Sometimes she repeated the Mandarin words she knew, but it was mostly facts about the Red Planet. To remind herself it was real, it existed, it was there” (7).

Movies
Science Fiction revolving around Mars in the 20th century tended to be either an imperialist fantasy of conquering the planet or a translation of American manifest destiny and the Western frontier onto Martian topography. Much of Moreno-Garcia’s influence came from these authors as well as Mexican sci-fi films from the 1960s. In Mexploitation Cinema, by Doyle Greene, the author discusses the film genre of the same name from the period which most pertains to films portrayed in Prime Meridian—1957-1977. Specifically of interest was Santo vs. la invasión de los marcianos (from here referred to as just Santo). Santo is one of the few Mexican Science Fiction films about Mars (or in this case Martians). The Mexican lucha libre hero, Santo, is made to fight Martians. “[Santo is] based on the most generic of science-fiction plot devices, an invasion of Earth by inhabitants of the planet Mars,” comments the author, speaking to the by then banality of Martian invaders. Consumers had come a long way from the wonder (and horror) of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, and the mass panic created by the 1938 dramatized radio broadcast of the same story (Markley 203-8). Although Moreno-Garcia has created versions of these types of 1960s sci-fi films for her own metaphorical purposes, they have a basis in the reality of films produced in Mexico during this era of filmmaking.

Lucía Madrigal, Amelia’s one constant client on Friendrr, introduces Amelia to the world of films produced during the Golden Age of Mexican cinema. One she calls “Conqueror Women of Mars,” sounds similar to El Planeta de las Mujeres Invasoras (The Planet of Female Invaders). Another science fiction movie Lucía filmed had nothing to do with Mars, rather it was a “lost-world story” set on Earth after a nuclear apocalypse. Lucía mentions that the project somehow involved Vikings, but she didn’t remember how, and she makes the offhanded comment, “I suppose any concept was a good concept if they could get half a dozen pretty girls into furry bathing suits”(30). This is partially what put Lucía’s movies, and Mexican sci-fi of the time, into the category of Mexploitation—sex sells. However, Lucía also laments that “The movie industry in Mexico was eroding by the time the 60s rolled around,” the movies they did make were bad and low-budget featuring “go-go dancers and wrestlers and monsters,” which were also landmarks of real-life Mexploitation film (28).