Embargo on Hope

Embargo on Hope is the first novel in the Star Marked series, written by Justin Doyle and released on August 20th, 2021.

Plot
An embargo has been set by the Planetary Alliance around the planet Vastire. The P.A. hopes to eliminate the caste system on Vastire, a social construct that violates the sentient rights of the lowest caste members, the Olan-Har. Unfortunately, after three years, the embargo hasn't changed anything and the Olan-Har are worse off than ever: starving, sick, and dying by the hundreds each day.

Darynn Mark, a teenage Olan-Har living in the slums of the city of Ziphyr, works with his best friend Pavlar Solia to help the Olan-Har survive. The P.A. is sending quasi-weekly shipments to Vastire intended for the poor, but most of them are stolen by the greedy Olan-Har gangs. Darynn and Pavlar have successfully raided a few shipments, and now it's time to raid another one.

Kaylaa Reesae breaks through the embargo on a stealth ship as one of Senator Shuka of Yiptae's bodyguards. She stays behind to mentor Darynn, with the hope of pushing him into inciting a revolution to end the caste system. Darynn is reluctant, as that is exactly what his father Zilpohn Mark did, resulting in his family's fall from the Elite caste to the Olan-Har. It's also a personal mission for Kaylaa, as her father was supposedly killed by Zilpohn on Yiptae, and she wants to know why he was there and what drove Zilpohn to kill her father.

Kaylaa's father told her Zilpohn would mumble about the Temple of Stria-Fate while in jail, and she convinces Darynn that they should go there. Darynn is leery of following in his father's footsteps because what will save him from his father's apparent madness. Kaylaa eventually convinces him to go. Before they can leave Ziphyr, they run into Fyra Solia, Pavlar's psychic sister, and she decides to go along with them.

Read the novel Embargo on Hope to find out more.

Development
The author was fascinated by the embargo of South Africa to end apartheid, and that event gave rise to the thought "what if there was an embargo that surrounded an entire planet?" From there, the novel grew organically, as the author is very much a "pantser." An outline was never written for the book.

The author started Embargo on Hope in June of 2005 and completed the first draft in 2006. He worked on it off and on for the next fifteen years, continuing to tweak and throw in new ideas along the way. Then when the COVID-19 quarantine hit in the United States, he devoted a lot of time to improving his writing craft, and wrote an entire new draft of the novel by the end of 2020.

At beginning of 2021, he put it through the beta reader phase. Two readers gracefully read the novel and provided their comments.

While performing the "final" manuscript edit based on the beta reader comments, Atmosphere Press responded to Justin's manuscript submission from December, stating they wanted to publish the book. He abruptly shifted gears from self-publishing to publishing through them, and finished the beta edit process in late February.

Critical Response
Reader's Favorite rated it as 5 Stars: "In his novel Embargo on Hope, Justin Doyle draws the reader into the story with a strong sense of world-building and character development. Fans of the Star Wars saga will discover a whole new universe ripe with interplanetary politics... any fan of science fiction or action-adventure would enjoy this book."