First published 2016
In a future where authorities have banned the music of dancefloor divas, rebels stage a single night exhibition of forbidden songs as a warning to society. The performance becomes a flashpoint between state control and artistic expression. Meanwhile, high school students on the margins invent a fictional target for their anger and frustration. They craft this imaginary scapegoat in elaborate detail, giving him a name, a history, and reasons to hate him. Then someone discovers his actual corpse. The discovery forces the students to confront what their collective imagination has unleashed into reality. On colonial Mars, settlers face their own crisis of identity and purpose. They decide Oscar Wilde holds the key to their cultural survival. As these three narratives unfold across different times and places, characters struggle with the boundary between what they create in their minds and what manifests in the physical world. Memory shifts into imagination, and imagination births new realities that demand consequences.
Genres: science-fiction, dystopia, speculative-fiction, 21st-century, alternate-history, gay-fiction
Vibes: atmospheric, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: consequences-of-creation, found-family
Setting: Mars, Colonial Mars
Period: Future
242 pages · Paperback · Lethe Press