Few YA novels are actually written by teenagers, but here is one for you, a first novel by a 19-year old college sophomore and published poet in New England. His imaginative SF creations include a new class of people called djia (diaphanes, or translucent persons with electron clouds instead of faces, and bodies made of neural nets shrouded in a dull green electronic glow). A djia will be your most loyal friend and companion, as with our hero Jared Fallon and his electronic sister and soul mate, the enigmatic Stella. Djia, created by a cruel corporate galaxy three thousand years from now, have gender (male or female) but not sexuality. Jared's real love interest at the core of this story is a beautiful, fully human golden surfer girl named Mala Alamala, on a remote summer planet named Arcturus. Mala works in a bookstore by the beach. Together, they dream of happiness and love amid total war, betrayal, and destruction. Far Wars is a sweeping, poetic, and melancholy novel of galactic apocalypse, betrayal, and conspiracies. Jared Fallon and his devoted Stella escape at the last moment as alien fleets start pulverizing the capital. Three thousand years from now, Mercury Free Port City is history's most powerful economic republic (empire in all but name). The Byzantine city-nation is vast, powerful, morbidly corrupt, and now under attack from inside and out. Jared Fallon struggles with an even darker stuff in his own life. Just as he graduated from the Academy, and became the empire's star Olympic runner, his future was taken by a beautiful but ruthless young princess name Lyxa (Li Sha, or Elizabeth VIII, extinct Royal House of Vega) who arranged for him be stationed near her, a personal pet. She does this sort of thing to people as a routine exercise of her whims; but nobody argues with the powerful heiress of a galactic fortune. Her palace in Mercury Free Port City is a short walk from government buildings that rule the galaxy. Jared Fallon, born to a poor family, worked his way up as a scholar and athlete. He is handsome, intelligent, honest, and ambitious. He dreamed of serving as a combat officer on the frontiers, which would have one day put him in line for top civil leadership. Instead, his lover and owner Princess Lyxa keeps him on a short leash, assigned to the office of Interior President Cyrus Mbe. That puts Jared in the midst of highest-level conspiracy politics including a plot to seize power by his conflicted, tormented boss Mbe. In his loneliness and isolation, Jared's closest friend is Stella, a female djia (diaphane, a see-through 'person' composed largely of a nervous system in a glowing, dimly green shell of energy). Stella, his closest and most loyal friend, loves him beyond all measure, though they cannot be physically intimate. She would die for him, and he loves her as a sister and companion. Princess Lyxa genetically engineers a djia named Lelli, who is just as strong and sweet, and loyal to Lyxa, as Stella is to Jared. Djia, however, secretly communicate with each other via psi net. Lyxa plans for Lelli to spy on Jared, butdjia are just as loyal to each other as to their human companions. Amid political chaos, while alien fleets start pulverizing the suburbs of Mercury FPC, Jared and Stella flee on one of the last ships outbound. Soon, on a sunny wonderful summer world named Arcturus, where Jared meets and falls in love with a solid, beautiful young golden-blonde surfer woman. Mala Alamala works in a bookstore by the beach, where sunshine and soft samba rhythms float in the air. When Princess Lyxa's corruption invades Arcturus and ruins everything, Stella disappears. Lelli likewise is somewhere, but where? Jared and Mala flee for a yet more remote paradise planet named Lethe (Forgetfulness), where light and darkness converge in a final starbath. This story is intoxicating, beautiful, intense, melancholy, and unforgettable.