Hermes

A journey through the centuries on the way to a threatened planet, Emily Chance's astonishing visionary creation both reflects and redefines the history of our own world. By 2150, Earth is a toxic wasteland. The last exhausted, lonely, human has died. Far above the Earth, on an abandoned space station, an artificial intelligence originally designed to take humanity to the stars, sends a desperate plea for help to a world which they had been unable to reach. Forty light years away, ‘they’ respond and travel back to humanity's beginnings to try to help lead them away from their dark ending. Over thousands of years, determined to offer the gifts that could save humanity, they become more and more involved at what they know to be key points in Earth’s evolving history, until they recognise a terrible truth: their own survival is at stake. Hermes is an engaging work of speculative fiction that explores the essence of what it is to be human. The novel examines the future of humanity by reflecting on its past.