Planetfall
Emma Newman
Roc
Trade Paper, $15 US/$20 CAN
ebook $9.99

I’d like to thank Roc Books for the review copy. Emma Newman is not an author whose work I’d read before starting this book. She’s definitely someone whose work I would consider reading in the future.

Planetfall is one of those books where the backstory unfolds as events move along, kind of like peeling back the layers of an onion. Therefore, in order to avoid spoilers, I’m a little hesitant to tell much of the backstory.

Here’s what we know as the book opens. Renata Ghali is the engineer in charge of maintaining the three dimensional printers on an isolated colony world. The settlement has been there for about twenty years. It was founded by a woman named Lee Suh-Mi. She and her followers came there to find God in an alien artifact, although the God they’re trying to find doesn’t seem to have much in common with the God of Christianity.  As far as the colonists know, Suh-Mi has disappeared inside the artifact and will one day emerge. The colonists are waiting for that day.

Then one day, a stranger walks in from the surrounding grasslands. He claims to be Suh-Mi’s grandson, raised on the other side of the continent by the survivors of a crashed pod.

Ren, who has a number of secrets of her own, can’t help but wonder what he’s hiding. There should be no other people on the planet. As the newcomer seems to latch onto her, Ren’s world, which she’s carefully constructed begins to unravel. Not only will her personal secrets be exposed, but the true history of colony will be revealed. Because not everything the colonists know is actually so.

The society the colonists have formed doesn’t seem to be one that I would want to live in. Newman gives hints that too many things are subject to a vote by the whole colony. I’m not sure I would want to live under some of the conditions shown.

On the other hand, I really liked the way the mystery unfolded. Newman judiciously used flashbacks, not all of them in chronological order, to satisfy the reader’s curiosity (at least this reader’s curiosity) about the backstory while at the same time creating a desire to know more.

While I didn’t initially care much for Ren, as I learned more about her, she kind of grew on me.  She’s a very flawed protagonist, and she’s hiding a secret that I’ve not seen before in any of the fiction I’ve read (although her flaw is the subject of at least one TV show).  By the end, I was rooting for her in spite of some unsavory aspects to her personality.

Planetfall is a good science fiction mystery with the science generally well-grounded.  What set Lee Suh-Mi on her quest to go to this planet and find God was an interesting twist that reminded me of some classic film sf from the 50s and 60s.  I haven’t seen this particular trope used in quite a while, which made it seem fresh.  I found the ending a little too transcendental for my taste, but overall this was an enjoyable novel.   I was a little hesitant to read it initially because I wasn’t sure if I was part of the target audience, but I’m glad I did.