Star Shores

Where people’s well-being and their spiritual perfection stop being the highest goal—where a person is turned into a faceless cog—science risks degenerating into a sinister, enslaving force. That’s exactly what happens in the novel “Star Shores.” The heroes of the novel end up on a planet that resembles their native Earth, but completely stripped of life: an endless ocean of sand covers its surface. The reasons are clarified later. Once, the inhabitants of Harda transferred control not only of production, but of purely human spheres of life to the most perfect automata. “The electron laid cunning traps, promising humans a well-fed, mindless life...” And human beings turned into a mere appendage of a self-regulating technological system. Eventually, the superbrain “translated” the people into another state—because they are not on this planet, “packaged” into tiny information cells inside grains of sand. The ominous grey-yellow desert turns out to embody a cybernetic “ideal”…