DAWN Of GENESIS: Titan Code Book 1 by Rey Clark – Sci-Fi, Post-Apocalypse, Young Adult

Dawn of Genesis: Titan Code Book 1 by Rey Clark portrays a near future Earth that is dying by inches, feet, and yards.

Specifically, yards and acres of crops are choked to death by a constant dust-bowl. Only a small human population has so far managed to survive the collapse of both the environment and the economy of the entire world.

The desperate circumstances of most of humanity are exacerbated by the rise of mutated super-humans with powers to rival those of typical superheroes. But the “Evos,” evolved humans, are missing the moral compass that directs those comic book superheroes, and the government that has arisen to “protect” the remaining non-Evo population isn’t much better.

The reader’s perspective on that boiling stew is teen Tessa Jones, still in school and trying to pretend that her combat and engineering skills aren’t nearly as excellent as she knows they are.

If she shows what she’s really capable of, she’ll be whisked away from her family’s farm by a government that uses – and uses up – every available person in order to defeat the Evos.

But Tessa’s dreams of remaining with her family explode when she manifests her own Evo powers to save her little sister’s life. Unable to hide what she really is, Tessa becomes a pawn, caught between forces that plan to use her for their own ends, either as a warrior for the Evos or a lab rat for a government planning to make more super-soldiers just like Tessa.

Because Tessa is still learning about the world and her place in it, she provides an eye-opening perspective on this post-apocalyptic world, as well as giving the story crossover appeal to readers of young adult and new adult fiction.

Tessa is on the cusp of adulthood, facing decisions that will set the course of her life. She is still facing all the issues of being in school: boredom, bullying, trying to fit in and desperate not to stand out too much. Even in the post-apocalypse, these issues are easy for readers to identify with.

She also tries to find her truth, to find a way of coping with the dying world she has been born into. She’s aware that what she hears about the larger world is all propaganda, and she doesn’t know which way to turn or what to believe because she has no idea where to find the truth.

She’s naive, she’s uncertain, and she’s desperate because she’s trapped in terrible circumstances facing equally terrible choices, none of them of her making. But she is the one person who might be able to fix at least some of her world, if she is willing to take the reins of the future into her own hands.

Dawn of Genesis is a post-apocalyptic survival story. And it’s a story about one young woman making a place for herself on a dying Earth. But it’s also a story about training and learning to be the most that one can be, and it’s a kick-ass adventure story about grabbing a better future.

Dawn of Genesis by Rey Clark won 1st Place in the 2019 CIBA Cygnus Book Awards for Science Fiction.