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. Continue reading →