A place in humanity’s last sanctuary sounds like salvation. Until someone has to decide whether you deserve one.
That dilemma drives Noah’s Arc, the debut
novel by Marvin R. Marriott, launching December 1. Set against the aftermath of
a devastating global war, the book imagines a refuge beneath the Atlantic
Ocean, where scientific achievement offers the possibility of a fresh
beginning. Admission, however, requires more than surviving the world outside.
The story opens in 2046. The Great War and its surrounding
devastation have claimed one third of humanity, leaving the remaining
population facing crime, famine, disease, and oppressive control. Technology
reaches into nearly every part of daily existence. Systems once welcomed for
their convenience have become instruments through which freedom can be
restricted and entire cities brought to their knees.
Against this background stands the Arc, a manufactured
island extending 27,493 feet into the Milwaukee Deep. Conceived by Six Cubed
Corporation and built through an international effort, it houses laboratories,
living spaces, artificial ecosystems, and the equipment needed to sustain a new
civilization.
Its promise is enormous. So is the responsibility of
choosing its inhabitants.
Dr. Olivia Noah becomes central to that responsibility. A
scientist with training in human biology and bioethics, she has spent years
questioning what drives people toward violence and whether destructive behavior
can be changed. The Arc gives those questions an urgency: humanity’s future may
depend on determining who will help preserve it.
Working alongside Olivia is AGNES, an advanced artificial
intelligence created by Aiden Montgomery. AGNES manages the facility’s systems
and processes information on a scale no human mind could match. Yet the
selection process depends on something beyond its analytical reach.
Through the novel’s fictional temporal centrifuge, Olivia
witnesses defining moments in prospective inhabitants’ futures. Acts of
compassion, betrayal, suffering, and sacrifice become part of an evaluation
with consequences far beyond the laboratory. A person’s life can unfold before
her while that person remains unaware of what she has seen.
This premise gives the book its sharpest moral tension.
Knowing more about someone does not automatically make judging them simple.
What weight belongs to a mistake? Can future usefulness define a human being’s
worth? And what happens when the pursuit of a better world begins treating
people as problems to be solved?
Marriott brings a background in safety and emergency
response to his first novel. Born in Jamaica and raised in Brooklyn, he spent
more than three decades with MTA New York City Transit before retiring as a
Director in the Office of System Safety. His experience provides a backdrop for
fiction concerned with complex systems and consequential decisions.
For readers drawn to speculative technology, moral conflict,
and the dangers hidden within perfect solutions, Noah’s Arc
offers a future worth questioning. Its refuge may stand apart from the ruined
world, but the arguments shaping that world have followed humanity beneath the
waves.
On December 1, step inside the Arc, where the promise of a
new beginning comes with a question: who gets to belong?