The Last Voyage (my new sci fi novel)
It’s 2056 and international oligarchs have pushed the world to the precipice of ecological, economic, and nuclear catastrophe.
But two philanthropists have teamed up to establish a viable outpost on Mars.
Could this daring outpost be the next chapter in the story of the human race? Or will its brilliant team of scientists and engineers repeat the folly of humans on Earth?
When the project’s founders on Earth discover that Mars Base has been keeping a terrifying, multi-layered secret from them, they recruit an unusual crew for a last voyage. Will these young voyagers bring what’s needed for the fledging community on Mars to flourish?
In this first volume in a thrilling new trilogy from Brian McLaren, you’ll explore the limits of technology, the deepest needs of the human spirit, and the abiding questions that energize humans wherever they live … on Earth or elsewhere in space.
Available July 29, 2024
Order/Pre-order Now:
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Brief responses to questions people are asking:
Why Sci-Fi? Why now?
My long-time readers will remember a fictional trilogy I published back in 2001-2005, so fiction isn’t new to me. I’ve always loved the science fiction/fantasy genre, and several years ago, I began work on this project. Just as reading helps us keep our sanity in insane times, writing this new trilogy has done that for me. Sci Fi for me is a way of grappling with our current problems on Earth by projecting them across space and time. Getting that distance sometimes helps us see and face things we couldn’t face otherwise.
You recently wrote Life After Doom, which focused on ecological overshoot. Is The Last Voyage cli-fi?
I think so. But less as a fictional warning about the nonfiction of climate change like Don’t Look Up (which I thought was very powerful, and – unfortunately – very needed). The Last Voyage is more of an experiment in imagining a new kind of human-Earth and human-human relationship.
Why Mars?
Humans (most recently, Earth’s richest person) have always projected their hopes and fears on Mars. Sadly, for some it represents an escape plan … “If we ruin the Earth, we can always retreat to Mars,” they seem to think. I wanted to confront that delusion as directly as I could. For me, what Mars represents is less possibility and more sterility. I see it as a sterile environment, like a laboratory, that helps us see more clearly who we are and what we might become, wherever we are.
Who is the protagonist?
In this trilogy, the protagonist isn’t a single person. On one level, the protagonist is a team of people, diverse, troubled, conflicted at times, but ultimately good, resilient, and wise. On another level, the protagonist is a set of human values or qualities that bond this team together. There are several important individual characters, of course … a billionaire philanthropist who poses as an oligarch but actually operates from a completely different set of values … his partner, the Ukrainian widow of an oligarch who despises the code the super-rich and super-powerful live by … a young American theologian-ethicist who has been recruited for a challenge she feels is too big for her … a teenage musician-poet from Palestine who has survived too much already in her young life … a Guatemalan geneticist who tells corny jokes … an aging ecologist who knows he is arrogant but can’t seem to do anything about it.
What follows The Last Voyage?
Volume 2 is called The Great Rift. It unfolds on Mars Base, which is located in the Valles Marineris, the great rift of Mars. The human community there must face a kind of social and spiritual great rift that is tearing them apart. Volume 3 is called Ethnogenesis. It unfolds thirty years after The Last Voyage and The Great Rift, and involves a woman on Mars secretly re-establishing contact with a group of humans on Earth who are in constant danger from the oligarchs and the global network of labor camps they have established.
What draws a former college English teacher and pastor, a public theologian, and activist to write a book like this now, in this moment?
The themes that I have written about for my whole career have suddenly shown up in the headlines every day … what does it mean to be a human being … a good human being? Why have both religion and science failed to make us more wise and generous? What practices help people mature and change for the better? What happens when institutions we have long taken for granted begin to fail? What makes a life truly meaningful and worth living? How does needed social change happen? Does money always win in the end? Writing this trilogy is helping me engage with all of these themes … not just theoretically or abstractly, but in a concrete story with characters I have grown to love.
Finally, what are your favorite science fiction books or movies?
I recently read Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I loved it and can’t stop thinking about it. I’m a fan of all of Kim Stanley Robinson’s work – especially his Mars series and Ministry for the Future, and Andy Weir’s Artemis and The Martian. I appreciate Orson Scott Card’s fantasy and sci fi, and, of course, Tolkein and C. S. Lewis. Mary Doria Russell’s The Swallow is also a favorite. When it comes to series and movies, of course, I love Star Trek in all its iterations. I loved The Expanse. As for movies … Arrival, Interstellar, The Hunger Games … the whole genre fascinates me. I’m a fan of all of literature, but there’s something about science fiction/speculative fiction that helps us imagine new possibilities and “new worlds.” We need that these days, don’t we?
Brian will be available for podcasts and other media interviews about The Last Voyage on June 18-19, July 28-30, and August 8, 2025. If you’d like to schedule an interview with Brian about The Last Voyage, contact: kaitlyn.shokes@johnmurraypress.co.uk
