Here’s the set-up for Eric Liu’s Terrene: The Hidden Valley, just $2.99 on Kindle:
Within every person lies the power to change one world. Within Flora lies the hope for two.
In the isolated rural valley of Terrene, where technology is grown, not manufactured, Flora Karachi paints her anguish with flowers and yearns to travel outside the mountain walls that guard her village. But in a society which values harmony and symmetry above all else, her dangerous curiosity and her indelicate scars, earned from a lifetime of inexplicable blackouts, make her an outcast with few prospects for adventure.
Then the dreams come. Lucid and overpowering, they throw Flora into a fascinatingly advanced world where she lives the life of Jane Ingram, an American scientist fighting global climate change while trying to raise a child in a society where interpersonal interaction is becoming obsolete.
Living two lives, Flora will fight to become an Institute scholar in her own world while struggling to save the planet from humanity’s neglect in Jane’s. Yet all of Flora’s courage combined with all of Jane’s experience may not be enough to defeat the powerful forces protecting the secret which ties their two worlds together. To find salvation for both worlds, Jane and Flora must sacrifice their own dreams, conquer their fears, and discover hope for a new beginning.
Hailed as a clever blend between science fiction and fantasy, Terrene explores the challenges of accelerating technology and global climate change through the stories of two remarkable women in two worlds that are not as distant from each other as they seem.
Eric Liu is a career technologist, amateur sociologist, and passionate futurist. He has technical degrees from MIT and Stanford and has worked in high tech companies in Silicon Valley for over eight years. He exercises his creativity through song, dance, and writing and believes that we make the world stronger by bringing disparate things together: art and industry, science and tradition, corporations and communities, and government and technology.
He believes a story can change the world.
“What we read, watch, and discuss can have a real impact on our lives,” he says.