Runaway Humanity

Rarely a day goes by these days that there’s not some disheartening story in the paper, on the news, or in the trending section of Twitter, about climate change and the tragic effect it is having on the planet, whether it be a small localized area, or an ecosystem, or a species, or worldwide ramifications that are just going to get worse as time passes and we continue to do too little. Runaway Humanity takes you to the not-too-distant future where things have gone terribly wrong on Earth, and what part of humanity has managed to survive on Mars is wondering if there’s anything left of the blue planet worth saving.

In the opening pages of Runaway Humanity by Joshua Valentine, it has been thirty years since the hundred million or so remaining humans abandoned Earth and fled to Mars, where life goes on in a sense, although it’s a very harsh one on the red planet, with cases of cancer staying high. Moving and living below ground has helped that a little, but this is still very different from the comfortable ways things used to be back on the third planet from the sun. And then the Mars Administration of Space and Extraterrestrial Research (MASER) makes an astonishing discovery: some form of life is detected on the supposedly extinct planet, and it’s not some extreme form of microorganism existing in severe conditions. So what is it, then?

Dr. Shelby and Dr. Drake Hilton are tasked with solving this mystery. They must make a daring mission to Earth, leaving their son and the certain world they know for one of risk and the unknown. Also, things aren’t totally copacetic at MASER, so the husband and wife team aren’t sure if this is all being done for the right reasons. And when they do finally arrive in what was once the Sierra Nevada of California, they are met with a form of humanoid they cannot begin to understand.

Valentine has written a compelling science fiction novel that is driven by a strong plot, but it also has complex and interesting characters and plenty of conflict to keep the reader hooked on every page. The key to Runaway Humanity is that you never know what’s going to happen next, and that’s what truly drives the story. And Valentine, a drag queen, has also injected his physical self into the novel with photos in the opening pages leading up to the start of the book with some content warnings, setting an intriguing tone for the story the reader is about to consume.