Official Review: Callisto 2.0 by Susan English
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Official Review: Callisto 2.0 by Susan English
The protagonist of Callisto 2.0, a sci-fi novel written by Susan English, is Callisto Collins (aka Calli). It is the year 2097, and she is an accomplished thirty-one-year-old physicist specializing in faster-than-light space travel and warp fields. Unfortunately, our dear planet is in bad shape. Some decades before, years of devastating global viral pandemics that began in 2020 with Covid killed more than half of the world’s population. Also, decades of rising global temperatures have brought the human race to the brink of extinction.
Against this backdrop, Calli gets invited by a beautiful woman named Diana to work at an all-female space-based lab that orbits the Moon. There’s a lunar colony called Arcadia, and the lab is called Shambhala. But Shambhala is much more than an orbital lab. Named after a mythical realm without injustice, cruelty, and conflicts, it is a fascinating utopian community where women live in harmony. Even Annie, their artificial intelligence, is female. Calli finds happiness there as she works hard with a colleague named Hadley Hansen on the warp field.
What I liked the most about this novel was its visionary, inclusive, and heartwarming premise. The author presents a character-driven plot nicely developed against powerful LGBT and environmental backdrops, which I thoroughly enjoyed. The characters are well developed and markedly diverse, and there are remarkable women from all over the world. For instance, Berit is Egyptian, and Quinn, a filtration specialist responsible for clean air and water, is from Tanzania. There are biologists too. Zoe, for instance, is in charge of algae farming. In short, it is a female-centric community, a sorority of sorts, and I greatly appreciated how the women get portrayed; they are very savvy and highly educated. Moreover, some of them argued that women work more cooperatively when there aren’t any men around, which I found intriguing.
The sci-fi elements are also well developed. There are holographic wrist computers, holographic projections, and micro-G food and drinks in biotex bags, among other sci-fi features. The author paints a credible picture of the future, with implants that allow the women to communicate seamlessly with Annie, the AI, whose voice they hear when the implant gets pressed. Additionally, the book has numerous allusions to Greek mythology, which I enjoyed. Calli’s parents, for instance, met during a revival of ancient Greek religion in California, and that was why they named her after a Greek goddess.
Lastly, there’s nothing negative worth mentioning in the book, and I rate it 4 out of 4 stars. It seems professionally edited, for I found no errors in it. If you’re looking for an original, female-based sci-fi plot, you should consider reading this amusing novel.
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Callisto 2.0
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