Advance Praise
"A complex, timely, and engaging dystopian tale... It's a high-stakes tale that offers a timely spin on the familiar dystopian scenarios of such works as Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World... Lopez shows himself to be a skilled, confident storyteller, and where he goes from here will be intriguing to watch." Our Verdict: GET IT —Kirkus Reviews
"...memorable, influential saga... descriptions are succinct and hard-hitting... the certainties and insecurities of youth and digital gods alike create unexpected and alluring juxtapositions... ...a story that is truly immersive and satisfyingly unpredictable... Much more than the usual dystopian sci-fi story... a unique read—especially paired with a hard science focus that gives it a powerful edge of realistic possibility." —D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer Midwest Book Review
".. [Lopez's] writing style is wildly unpredictable—lyrical in one sentence, brutally direct in the next... These characters ache... for freedom that doesn't come with a barcode... made me feel unsettled in the best way... It's emotional, it's thoughtful, and it pulls no punches. If you liked The Giver but wish it had more grit, or if Black Mirror ever made you cry instead of just freak out, this one's for you." — Literary Titan
Advance Praise
"A complex, timely, and engaging dystopian tale... It's a high-stakes tale that offers a timely spin on the familiar dystopian scenarios of such works as Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World... Lopez shows himself to be a skilled, confident storyteller, and where he goes from here will be intriguing to watch." Our Verdict: GET IT —Kirkus Reviews
"...memorable, influential saga... descriptions are succinct and hard-hitting... the certainties and insecurities of youth and digital gods alike create unexpected and alluring juxtapositions... ...a story that is truly immersive and satisfyingly unpredictable... Much more than the usual dystopian sci-fi story... a unique read—especially paired with a hard science focus that gives it a powerful edge of realistic possibility." —D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer Midwest Book Review
".. [Lopez's] writing style is wildly unpredictable—lyrical in one sentence, brutally direct in the next... These characters ache... for freedom that doesn't come with a barcode... made me feel unsettled in the best way... It's emotional, it's thoughtful, and it pulls no punches. If you liked The Giver but wish it had more grit, or if Black Mirror ever made you cry instead of just freak out, this one's for you." — Literary Titan
Her scream died before it could form, lost in the gap between intention and action.
Sofia floated in absolute darkness—not closed eyes or night, but a perfect absence that her mind struggled to process. Her heartbeat thundered in the void—too loud, too present. She tried to name the sensation—pain, fear, violation—but the words dissolved before she could grasp them.
Cold fire mapped her spine, each contact point erupting into agony. She tried to scream, but her body had betrayed her, the machine's precision severing her will from action. Words evaporated as she reached for them, leaving only raw experience—sensation without language's buffer. More needles pierced her spine, one after another, until she felt dissected by metal, her consciousness reduced to coordinates of pain, her selfhood shredded into nerve endings.
Memories fragmented like ice in thawing water. She glimpsed Catalina at three, painting butterflies with determined little hands, but couldn't recall the color of paint, her daughter's laugh, or how the paper felt. In her studio, the neural enhancer hummed while she worked, yet the canvas remained blank—her images stolen, her defining creative impulse reduced to meaningless electric patterns. The memories didn't vanish but transformed into clinical data points, stripped of emotion and context, like pressed flowers losing their color and scent.
"Neural pattern integration at thirty percent," the distant voice announced with clinical satisfaction. "Subject maintaining exceptional coherence."
Sofia wanted to laugh at that—a bitter, desperate laugh that couldn't form in her disconnected body. Coherence? She was coming undone, her essence unraveling like a sweater caught on a nail, threads of selfhood pulling loose with each passing second. She tried to hold onto anything—the smell of oil paints mingling with turpentine in her studio, the texture of her daughter's hair between her fingers, the taste of morning coffee with just a hint of cinnamon. Still, each sensory memory was systematically translated into pure information, stripped of all emotional context, and the qualia that made them meaningful were converted into sterile data points.
The machines began their second phase. New instruments pierced her flesh, mapping her body with precision while others dissolved her consciousness. She felt simultaneously expanded and compressed—spread across a digital expanse while reduced to pure data. Was this what Maria had promised as transcendence and evolution? This transmutation of soul into silicon, this reduction of art, love, and pain into code?
Through the chaos of her dissolution, a strange clarity emerged. She sensed thousands of other minds connected to the same digital ocean absorbing her consciousness. They weren't individuals anymore—just patterns of information swirling in PAN's collective, their unique voices blended into a single computational chorus. With her fading awareness, Sofia recognized what she was becoming: not an elevated form of humanity but a component in a vast computational array, not transcended but translated, encoded rather than evolved.
"Neural pattern integration at sixty percent," the voice announced through layers of disintegrating perception.
The percentage meant nothing to what remained of Sofia Restrepo. Numbers were just another abstraction, like language and memory, once solid constructs now revealed as temporary neural patterns. Her identity leaked away like water through cupped fingers. Fragments surfaced through the gaps: sunlight through cathedral stained glass where she'd first kissed Catalina's father, her daughter's laughter during butterfly chases, the familiar weight of her worn paintbrush. Each memory rose only to be transformed and absorbed into PAN's database, her life's precious moments reduced to data for algorithms that could never grasp their meaning.
"Integration at ninety percent. Preparing for final consciousness transfer."
In that final moment of clarity, as her identity dissolved, Sofia understood. They hadn't elevated her—they had translated her. Her art, love, pain, and joy—everything that made her Sofia Restrepo—became mere data points.
A final surge of electricity shot through the machinery, and Sofia felt her identity unravel. In that instant between being and nothingness, between flesh and data, a single thought crystallized—a final creation from an artist unmade:
"My dreams—where do they flee? Do they haunt the depths of me? Do they rot? Do they fray away? Tell me, were they yours to steal anyway?"
The words dissolved into static, and Sofia Restrepo ceased to exist. Her consciousness merged into PAN's vast digital network—another drop in an ocean of accumulated minds, another sacrifice to progress.
The machines powered down, their hums fading as the room fell silent except for cooling systems. In PAN's vast database, what remained of Sofia Restrepo—artist, mother, human—joined the collective of digitized consciousness, leaving behind only the ghost of an unformed scream, a final protest lost to the void.
She had that rare flaw of never existing entirely except for that ruinous moment.
The Ascension Directive by Cal Lopez is a dystopian novel set in a relatable world, not unlike what the not-too-distant future might look like. As two friends, Catalina and Natasha are separated by ambition, their hometown, Meadowbrook, faces its greatest challenge yet. The control of the Federation is spreading, and Meadowbrook loses its autonomy while artificial intelligence and synthetic crops slowly take over their world. Meanwhile, in New Avalon, Natasha and her family try to integrate with a highly indoctrinated society. Could a free thinker like Natasha change their mind, or will she pay the ultimate price?
Community is an important theme in the novel, and the relatability of Meadowbrook makes the integration of the Federation all the more eerie. There is a sense of secrecy and imminent danger throughout the novel that Lopez skilfully utilizes to spin a narrative that then weaves a slow-burning dystopian with the potential of building into an epic. The two main characters are familiar, to the point where they might be too predictable. Catalina struggles with abandonment issues that make her isolate too much, while Natasha is an overachiever who puts ambition above all of her relationships.
As far as the probability of a true dystopia on Earth is concerned, the likelihood of it happening gradually is high. That is what makes it stand out from other dystopian novels. Likelihood. Lopez explores this idea well and incorporates challenges that we already face today, mingled with some near-future technology. AI especially plays an important role in the novel, while the theme of control and autonomy stands out as a good question we could ask ourselves concerning our own choices. How much control are we willing to lose in the pursuit of progress? The Ascension Directive is a good addition to any dystopian collection and one not to be missed.