Arkendream — Patrick Moran

Norma Christianstead is the first person raised from conception to adulthood in zero gravity. The year is 2200. The stated goal is to determine how micro-gravity interacts with physical, intellectual, social and psychological development. While aboard her orbital home at a time when a lethal CRISPR-spawned plague is overtaking Earth, Norma learns there is another goal: to respond to the divinations of a secret artifact-a beacon-of an ancient civilization that vacated the Tharsian region of Mars a billion years earlier when the planet's seas evaporated. The response to the beacon demands nothing less than an epigenetic evolutionary alteration, for theTharsian genomic code is genophotonic: a hybrid consisting of physical and photonic parts. This is Patrick Moran's fourteenth novel. In it the author pursues his lifelong quest to come to grips with how and why gravity, the causal interaction that holds the universe together, and perception, the ability to grasp things in their entirety, are related. In Zero Gravity Girl he weds the two in a tale that redefines the meaning of love and life, time and space. For it is Patrick's reckoning that perception is the ultimate agency holding the whole shebang together, and that the universe is more than a very large collection of rocks, gas, and energy.