Gaia Enterprises is in the business of Earth: designing communities that can survive the ever-growing effects of climate change. When a shadowy financier offers the capital, Gaia takes a shot at transferring its experience to off-world colonization. In Zoë Routh’s THE OLYMPUS PROJECT, Earth’s best and brightest are recruited and trained to design the systems that will give humanity its first foothold amongst the stars. On its face, the most significant analogue to THE OLYMPUS PROJECT is likely Andy Weir’s The Martian: near-future stories about the fundamental challenges of sustaining human life on an inhospitable celestial body. However, Routh imagines a very different moment, one in which humans have yet to make the off-world leap–and focuses on a very different set of problems–the political and moral struggles surrounding the choice to move off-world, the incentives and pressures of corporate bodies to invest in these efforts, and especially social dynamics between people who will live and work in a closed environment for months on end. In this regard, THE OLYMPUS PROJECT is essentially closer to reality television like The Challenge: a mixed group of sometimes-competitors, sometimes-teammates performs strenuous mental and physical challenges, the last of these simply being the pressure-cooker of living indoors for a year.

The world feels well imagined, logically sound, and realistically rendered in matter-of-fact prose. THE OLYMPUS PROJECT’s frustrations are essentially structural. The text rapidly introduces a fairly large group of characters across the opening chapters before bringing them together for the Gaia Industries recruitment process; while these short “snapshots” might work in a visual medium, the result is disorienting for the reader, especially since many of these characters ultimately do not proceed to the second half of the novel. The first half is essentially recruitment and training to select a core team, the second half the experiment to develop and study best practices for survival on the moon, and although the choice to focus on every single character preserves some suspense about who will graduate to the experiment phase, it isn’t ultimately worth the work of managing the entire cast for the whole first half of the novel. The narrative also loses focus in the second half: the physical and social claustrophobia of the team and its self-contained habitat is mitigated by secondary plotlines about corporate espionage, power politics, and other concerns which ultimately have little bearing on either the direction or the thematic impact of the main plot. THE OLYMPUS PROJECT is about collaboration and competition in a way that works like The Martian are not, but it also loses some of the sharpness that accompanies much great science-fiction about smart, capable humans in contained spaces. And while the story could trim down its characters and plotlines to improve structure and flow, the core ideas about humanity’s relationship with itself, its world, and the future are meaty enough to merit a read.

THE OLYMPUS PROJECT is an entertaining and engaging read for anyone interested in the real technological, social, and political challenges which humanity is already facing – science fiction which will, in no great matter of time, be science fact.

~Dan Accardi for IndieReader