Planetfall (A Planetfall Novel)

Planetfall is an outstanding stand alone science fiction novel characterized by a gradual unfolding of insights and revelations. It’s a character focused novel that deals with mental health issues.

“We’re locked in this lie’s orbit together, none of us able to break its gravitational pull.”

Ren is the 3-D printer engineer for a human colony that lives in the shadow of a giant alien structure the colonists call “God’s City.” The settlement is built upon a foundation of lies, and Ren is one of only two people who knows the truth. The colony has existed for twenty years and the lies have never been revealed, but then a stranger arrives at the colony’s gates and everything begins to change.

Planetfall is a hard book to talk about in a review since so much of what I love about it is how little bits and pieces build upon themselves until you find out the whole truth of what’s going on in the colony.

“It gets easier, in some ways; now I lie without expending any effort. But I think each one has its own weight. One alone may barely register, like a grain of sand in the palm of one’s hand. But soon enough there’s more than can be held and they start to slip through our grasp if we’re not careful.”

I’ve seen some reviews that are unhappy with how long it takes for the information to be uncovered when the narrator clearly knows something. However, I think this ties in to the psychology of Ren herself. Ren is hiding a lot from herself, and there are clearly memories that are too painful for her to face. She tries to bury them but is never quite successful. She has problems with anxiety, the extent of which become more clear over the course of the book.

“Where am I among all these parts? Am I just a mosaic of myself, held in the shape of a whole person? Perhaps the cracks are too tiny for people to notice. Perhaps I only let them see the mosaic from a distance, still looking Ren-like.”

The plot of Planetfall is an important aspect of the book, and I found it compelling. However, I think the plot is most important for how it effects Ren’s mental state. Last note on Ren – she’s also bisexual and at least half black, although the book doesn’t deal with either race or sexual orientation. It’s so refreshing to see this sort of diversity.

As you might have inferred from the mention of “God’s City,” faith and mysticism play a large role in the book. The expedition that lead to the colony was created with the idea of finding God and lead by a visionary woman who woke from a coma with the coordinates for the planet on her lips. Planetfall‘s use of faith and mysticism remind me in some ways of Battlestar Galactica (the new one). Forewarning, if you hated BSG’s ending, you might not be happy with Planetfall‘s either. However, I liked both.

Overall, Planetfall is a pretty dark book but also a very compelling one. I think it’s one of the best stand alone science fiction novels I’ve read, and I am going to hold on to my copy for years to come. If you have a particular interest in a science fiction that explores anxiety and mental health issues, you will love Planetfall. Or, if you’re just looking for a well written story, I’d also recommend you Planetfall.

This is an interesting science fiction novel with problems. The colony part of the story is very interesting, the characters are real feeling but then the ending happens. Ren is eaten up with guilt about whatever happened after planetfall that changed everything. Then a stranger comes to the colony and he upsets everything. He makes Ren think about the past and it begins to drive her mad. So much is going on in this novel from Ren having a problem with hoarding, which feels like a bad plot device to a end game revenge plot that I really had some trouble connecting with this novel. About the hoarding, it could have not been in the novel and nothing would have changed with the story. Ren still would have been eaten with guilt and grief. She would have still ended up in the City of God and still would have died. I think that Newman did some interesting things with this novel but I did not connect with the overall themes of this story.

I give this novel a Three out of Five stars.

A small colony on a distant planet is threatened by a human outsider whose arrival uncovers secrets about the colony's origin. The book's speculative elements--the colony's 3D printing and communication network, the nearby alien structure and its effect on humans--are compelling, and inform everything from daily minutiae to the mystery plot to the colony's religious origin. The protagonist, Ren, has a distinct and precise voice, focused equally on engineering and the human condition; her comorbid mental illnesses are central to her experience as well as the plot's mystery. The depiction of these illnesses is complicated--it's unflinching, compassionate, but also exploited to build drama; upsetting to read at the best of times, but sometimes unjustifiably so. The ending abandons the local, colony-level scale for something more transcendental; I think it works, but it also compromises the pacing and tone. This is one of the more absorbing reading experiences I've encountered in a while: it has a great voice and protagonist, it's astute and wrenching and intriguing, and Newman has a phenomenal eye for detail; but too much is dictated by the murder-mystery plot--and those contrivances sometimes override the more successful, subtle elements.

Inasmuch that just about every single S.F book of the past 10 years or so always, without fail, leads to another and then another in a series I generally rate these kinds of books on whether or not I want to continue onto the next volume. In this case, the answer is decidedly no.

There are your usual S.F. tropes, totally unoriginal; the mysterious alien structure housing what’s thought to be God or some such super alien intelligence. (Is there a difference?). A high technology society of curiously unquestioning dumbbells living in an almost primitive enclave and who are easily outgunned by an even more primitive society, and a god-awful boring story that instead of taking over 300 pages to develop, could have been easily told in a nice and tidy 5 page short story.

None of the characters are at all compelling and have no redeeming virtues that make you want to root for any of them. You have the main protagonist with OCD harboring an awful secret, a manipulative cohort in crime who is the ringleader of said secret and its cover up, the religious zealot, various uninspired simple folk (aka "Extras") and the “new guy” trying to uncover the secret but who has a secret of his own. Everyone is mostly bad, no one is truly good and frankly, by the time I got to end of the book which took way too long to get to the revelation of the poorly concealed secret and its climax, I no longer cared about what happened to any of them.

So, between the nasty characters and the boring story which, when you think about it, has been done many times before by other writers in a much more exciting and original manner, I’ll pass on the sequel.

Planetfall was absolutely nothing like I was expecting. Yes, it's set in a future where colonists have uncovered a new planet and 3D printing is a way of life, but this is the kind of science fiction which adds depth to the story rather than being the focal point of it.

Planetfall is actually equal parts psychological thriller -- the kind of film where there are lots of close-ups of the heroine's eyes and sudden camera angle twists -- and character study. It's a great thriller -- I read the whole thing with a gradually increasing sense of unease. As the story goes on we become less and less sure whether Renata Ghali, our heroine, is the real danger or if it's the people or world around her where the problem lies. The claustrophobic atmosphere is brilliantly captured by Newman. Planetfall is also a book about loss. Ren has lost a lot, we find out as the story progresses: her parents, planet, girlfriend, daughter and -- best friend and the love of her life -- Suh-Mi, the Pathfinder. Planetfall is a beautiful study of grief, grieving and denial.

The book has a wonderfully diverse cast. Ren herself is a British-Ghanan bisexual and mental health issues (which to my eyes, appeared to be anxiety and OCD, but I could be wrong). All of which seemed well handled.

The last 10% (or so) -- after the unveiling of Ren's secrets and the mysterious past -- takes a slightly strange turn which didn't really feel like it fit with the rest of the story. All in all, though, Planetfall had me hooked throughout and is the kind of story I think will stay with you.

Over time I’ve come to understand that one sign of a great book is its ability to make you stop reading and ponder the implications of what you just read. To speculate and theorize in a way that’s too deep to do while still continuing to read on. Planetfall quickly became that kind of book for me, one where I needed to step back and start pondering the symbolism and implications of half of what was going on. I sank into that perfect brainspace that tells me yes, this book is one that provokes some interesting thoughts, and it’s definitely a keeper.

Planetfall starts out fairly innocuously, with the interesting idea of a smallish community on a non-Earth planet. The story is told in first-person viewpoint with Renata Ghali as the narrator, an engineer who lends her skills to the colony at the base of God’s city, where Lee Suh-Mi is said to be communing with God for the purpose of advancing the colony and doing God’s work The colonists left earth years ago, under Suh-Mi’s guidance, to find God and learn about humanity’s place in the universe. The colony runs fairly smoothly, at least on the surface.

Then a young man arrives, claiming to be Suh-Mi’s grandson, and his very presence threatens to unravel everything that the colonists have built.

On its surface, it seems like a fairly standard exploration of early human colonization of another planet, told from the perspective of a private person who was there when it all began. But it quickly becomes more than that. Newman starts the reader off partway through the story, telling necessary backstory in the form of seamless and brief flashbacks, revealing details piece by piece. I know that many people aren’t that fond of flashback storytelling, and I myself am rather torn on the matter (so often it can come across like a series of memory-infodumps, which gets irritating), but I find that Newman handled it well, making them relatively brief and with actual relevance to what was occurring in the plot. Ren having brief memories prompted by objects or places is perfectly natural, it happens to all of us, and so it wasn’t at all obtrusive, nor did it take me out of the story as a whole.

I love how very broken Ren is, and how slowly it all becomes clear to the reader. Little hints get dropped so subtly that by the time the big reveal hits, you’re left remembering all those small mentions that previous cropped up, putting all the pieces together until your heart just aches for her. Or at least mine did. Quite possibly because I can relate a bit to what she was going through, or at least some of the thought process behind it. Tension ran high once Ren’s secret is out in the open, too, and the colonists decide to force issues in unhealthy ways that leave her feeling trapped and threatened, and I felt my own anxiety surge when reading that particular scene. She was an interesting character even before that, of course, but the way her mental health comes into play added to my ability to relate to her, and I think it was all handled extremely well. Mental illness is a hard card to play in fiction, but Newman did it justice, I think.

One of the things that left me with an utter “Whoa!” moment was the parallel between this story and the Garden of Eden myth. To me this whole book was a twist on a creation myth, a sci-fi origin story. When you look into the flashbacks and realize that the journey from Earth and the discovery of a new planet with God’s city all started with a woman who ate a strange plant and then began to understand things far beyond what she’d understood before, the similarities become clear. However, that isn’t to say that Earth is meant to be Eden; part of the reason the initial colonists left with Suh-Mi was because the planet was devastated by overcrowding and pollution, and where they ended up had none of that. But when you see a story about how someone is influenced by forces they can’t understand, which leads them to gaining unprecedented knowledge and wisdom and leaving their home to search for God? Yeah, it’s pretty easy to draw the comparisons.

And I loved that! I love plays on myths, especially ones that draw from Judeo-Christian myths, because so many people see them as sacrosanct and unchangeable and yet they’re so familiar to Western culture that they’re often instantly recognizable when somebody does take that chance and play around with them. Newman tackled this all brilliantly, adding a wonderful new touch to an old story.

Long story short, Planetfall is definitely worthy of the high praise it has been receiving. It’s a compelling story of what people will do to maintain order, to keep up the status quo. It tackles mental illness, creation myths, and the questions of how much “for your own good” is actually still good. It’s more than just an early colonization story; it’s an exploration of humanity and its relation to the divine, to science, and to itself. It tells you that sometimes there are no explanations even when there are answers, and that there are times to leave well enough alone and time to delve deeper to gain a better understanding. Beautiful prose joins with fascinating subject matter, resulting in a profound book that has made its mark. Highly recommended for fans of social sci-fi, Planetfall does not disappoint.

Planetfall is...an interesting book. I was hooked early on with the unique setting: men and women from earth have inhabited another planet for about 20 years and they have a "zero footprint" way of living. Everything is recycled and their houses are actually living things.

There's a turn when the son of a lost founding member shows up at their colony. The story changes completely from there. One thing that was kind of aggravating but kept me reading is that you only get answers slowly and gradually. Instead of saying that someone is dead, we read that they're not coming back, then they can't come back, then they're dead, and it takes the remainder of the book to find out what happened and the mystery surrounding said person. The ending is pretty ridiculous and it feels like the author didn't know how to wrap the story up so she made up an ambiguous ending.

I was given an ARC of this book as a member of the Ace Roc Street Team in exchange for an honest review.

QUICK HIT – Ren lives in a colony located in the shadow of an alien edifice they call God’s City. Their homes, health, and lives are engineered. Everything is perfect—on the surface. Ren struggles through her own history and humanity in a world that is both far off and intimately close to home.

Planetfall by Emma Newman, cannot be adequately described by a simple review. It needs to be. It deserves to be. I’m just afraid that I won’t do it justice. If my review doesn’t excite you, please imagine that I did a better job and read it anyway.

Renata (Ren) is a human being, living in a farcast colony called Atlas. They’re situated in the shadow of the enigmatic City of God, a living structure that represents an unknown and possibly bygone alien presence. The members of the colony—one member in particular—have spun a religion around the citadel, and everyone waits for their messiah. Renata experiences something akin to a crisis of faith, but also a crisis that calls into question her sanity, and her own place in Atlas.

What I love most about this novel is its subtlety. Planetfall represents the kind of underlying cultural awareness and acceptance that I would hope to achieve in my own writing. The main character is not only not heterosexual, but Newman introduces this fact without resorting to a heternormative “coming out.” Ren simply is what she is and no one thinks anything of it. Additionally, Ren has dire personal struggles of an emotional nature, that hit very close to home for me, but that were handled so delicately that reading about them was actually cathartic.

Planetfall is a gift, a triumph, and the type of novel I hope to see more of in the coming years.

This was an interesting, but ultimately unsatisfying book.

To be perfectly honest, there’s a bit of a reveal partway through the book the floored me. It was completely unexpected, and it’s this reveal, and what Planetfall is attempting to tackle, that makes me glad I read this book, even though I’m rather disappointed by it.

In Planetfall you’re presented with a small group of humans who have established a small Star Trek like community on a new planet. This starts out interestingly enough, but quickly gets weird.

But it’s not sci fi weird, well, it is, but even with this, the sci fi elements of this story felt mostly like window dressing.

At heart, this is a story about loss and coping with that loss, which is a theme well established across all genres, but in Planetfall it doesn’t quite work

The best stories, whether sci fi or otherwise, use the genre to tell a story you can relate to, but with Planetfall, the genre and the story just aren’t meshed very well.

As a result, what is actually a good story gets lost in what feels like an author trying too hard to make an arty sci fi book.

Emma Newman’s Planetfall appears, at first blush, to be a straight-up, sci-fi colonization tale. A group of human space pioneers follows their leader, Suh, to an unnamed planet far, far from Earth. Once the colonists arrive on said unknown planet, Suh vanishes into a huge, odd plantlike structure found growing, or possibly built, there and dubbed “God’s city” by the settlers. Suh never reemerges from God’s city and becomes an oracle of sorts, believed to be still alive somewhere inside and called the Pathfinder by her disciples. She even becomes the subject of an odd pilgrimage a chosen colonist makes into God’s city as a yearly rite.

Twenty years later, when the events of Planetfall take place, the colonists are thriving, having quite successfully built a life for themselves on this anonymous rock spinning through space. You’ve got Mack, your strong, male colony leader with a secret. Helping to keep that secret, and hiding secrets of her own, is your female protagonist, Ren, the colony’s master printer (practically everything the colony needs to exist, including food, is created by 3-D printers, a concept I have yet to entirely get my head around). And you’ve got a wild card in Sung-Soo, a newcomer, offspring of two, long-thought dead, original colonists, and apparent grandson of Suh.

All’s good and usual in sci-fi land so far, right? So while you, the unsuspecting reader, are trucking along, engrossed in this, your latest spacey discovery, you begin to realize that Ren, the first-person narrator of Planetfall, is just a weeeeee bit different from your average planetary colonist. She’s fiercely private, she suffers from social anxiety and is a card-carrying introvert. Shoot, I could even relate a little . . . to a point . . . until it became clear that there was something very, very off with Ren. Hint: There’s a reality show showcasing people like Ren.

And this is where Planetfall becomes a different kind of colonization tale. I think it’s safe to say Emma Newman gets points for originality by incorporating a character with Ren’s particular disorder into her sci-fi work. I can’t say I particularly liked Ren, even though I could empathize with her at first. But her refusal to come to grips with her disease leaves me frustrated as she becomes increasingly more destructive to herself and the entire colony.

Newman has a new book coming out this fall, set in the same world as Planetfall. I’m curious to see where she heads for the next installment.

Full Disclosure: A review copy of this book was provided to me by PENGUIN GROUP Berkley, NAL / Roc via Netgalley. I would like to thank the publisher for providing me this opportunity. All opinions expressed herein are my own.

The author has good grammatical control of her writing and the initial idea of the book was very good but I felt the author was not really interested in focusing on the main theme of the book and rather wanted to focus to a great extent on some personality and character issues of the central character Ren. I found this book strange in that her central theme of a group of scientists being lured to find God to be a great premise worthy of a great epic but instead the author focused on Ren's hoarding and abivalence about her relationship with another women (Really?, Does someone go to another planet and leave your father, mother and everything you know so that your only thoughts are whether people will see your hoarding and whether you really want to have a long term relationship with this other woman). I am disappointed that the author was not able to get out of her basic drives and focus on the main theme. Sadly, it is only in the last twenty or so pages that the author returns to the theme only to have the reader tired and fatigued and not really care.

Science fiction, when it delves into the ways the human psyche can get all twisted up in different, delicious, ways, is the best kind of thoughtful, entertaining read for me.

Planetfall, through the voice of its deliciously unreliable narrator, Ren, is exactly that kind of book.

Ren is an engineer, fixing/running the 3-D printers of a small colony at the base of a giant bio-organism they call "God's City." She and another colonist, Mack, are hiding a huge, huge secret from the rest of the colonists. One entirely wrapped up in how they got to this planet in the first place-- through a visionary seer named Suh who lead them straight here from Earth.

But Ren is also hiding a huge, huge secret from Mack (and us), and not until Suh's grandson shows up will things begin to unravel.

Meanwhile we get Ren's secretive, standoffish, object-fixated narration of how the colonists' homes get energy, recycle waste, and are built. We get her slightly oblivious take on colonist relationships, and her overwhelming emotional issues.

I was riveted, fascinated with the little drops of clues and backstory that while not completely unguessable, certainly comes out of left field in the actual form the revelations about Ren and Mack take.

And then there's poor, broken Ren herself.

The ending is somewhat vague and mystical, but this kind of book can't give definitive answers without somehow diluting the strength of what it says about humans and our desire to be lead and to believe in people.

The book reminded me of Kelly Eskridge's Solitaire, in the use of Science Fictional contexts to explore hidden nooks and crannies of the human mind, strong, female protagonist, and slightly unreliable point of view. Excellent.

I'm confused by all the positive reviews, but maybe it's about what you expect? This is a book about mental illness wrapped up in a sci-fi package, which may be why it's spoken to some people. On the other hand, if you're not fascinated by hoarding, the lack of a plot and the abrupt ending in which nothing is explained or makes sense may be as frustrating for you as it was for me. As another reviewer noted, for a book set on another world this has almost no worldbuilding, descriptions of the world's creatures or features (except the starry night sky), and I kept waiting for a plot. Instead, the book diverted (it felt to me at first) into the main character's hoarding issues and then stayed there, for about a hundred pages, before the confusion at the ending. And by that I don't mean I was confused by the ending, I mean the ending came out of nowhere, made no sense, and left me thinking Newman wanted to write a book about hoarding and mental illness and just sort of folded the plot/scifi around it without worrying about its plausibility or all the unanswered questions it raises. Certainly not what you'd expect from the blurb and packaging.

Newman pens a riveting tale of humanity, imagination, and science fiction with “Planetfall.” Earth is becoming unmanageable.  Lee Suh-Mi has a vision of finding God. She strikes out with a group to find God’s planet in a spaceship called Atlas.

When Suh-Mi and her party arrive at the planet, it’s not what they expect. Mack and Renata are left to deal with the repercussions of “Planetfall.”

Now, 22 years later, a stranger, Sung-Soo, interrupts the tranquil life of the colony which Mack and Renata have built. Will his presence finally reveal God’s message or destroy the community Suh-Mi built?

Newman’s writing is easy to read. The story is told from Renata’s perspective and as the reader dives deeper into the story, they dive deepter into Renata’s character. Initially heroic and sympathetic, Renata reveals cracks that hint at the mental illness Planetfall has done to her. The supporting cast is interesting and each has a part to play. The actual science of the science fiction is easy to understand and doesn’t weigh down the storytelling. The suspense builds slowly at first then snowballs towards the end.

The book earns a solid 4 due to the ending which is a bit disappointing, given the totality of the story. “Planetfall” has a good blend of science fiction and characterization that will keep the reader intrigued and turning the pages to find out what happens next.

 

 

Today is the last for 2016 Hugo Award nominations, and I need to get this review of Emma Newman’s Planetfall out there before the clock strikes midnight. This novel is particularly noteworthy in light of the troubled history of the Hugos over the last few years. I’ve watched this ongoing saga unfold with distress, while doing my best to stay out of the fray. At the risk of oversimplifying and misrepresenting both sides, my own take is that this is a battle between science fiction with an old fashioned “sense of wonder,” and “character driven” science fiction. I know that neither side characterizes the other so generously, but this is my own personal distillation of what is really going on in this dispute.

For my money, the very best science fiction has both a sense of wonder and first rate characterization. Very few novels actually fall into such a rare category. I believe Planetfall is one of them. Any reader who approaches this novel with an unbiased mind, and sticks with it all the way to the end, will most certainly find this to be true.

If there is anything one might criticize about this story, I can see many being annoyed by how long Newman takes to flesh out her POV character Ren and weave her into the larger story. I actually enjoyed that Newman did this and found myself rewarded later as this groundwork paid off in a character symbiotically linked to the story events. Ren wouldn’t be Ren without the story events, and the story could not unfold as it did without Ren. And Ren is a hot mess! Her problems are actually off-putting at times, and yet they draw you tighter into Ren.

Ren is such a well developed character that I found myself lulled into thinking that such strong characterization might mean a less than developed plot. Wrong! Every time I figured I had a handle on where things were going, Newman surprised me. And every surprise had an integral, organic feel that left me slapping my forehead for not anticipating it. As for “sense of wonder,” the last few pages left me tingling with the same type of awe I felt as a kid first discovering the genre.

This novel will definitely find itself as one of the “best novel” choices on my Hugo ballet. If, like me, you are torn and saddened by what has gone on with the Hugo’s, then give this novel a try. I believe it has everything anyone could want in a science fiction novel.

The best science fiction allows you to look at your own humanity in a new way. I like books about new worlds and establishing new communities. Here a group of people, lead by a religious visionary, come to a new planet. We meet them twenty or so years after Planetfall, and see what has been established, what is true and what is not. It's written beautifully and I read it quickly. I loved all the characters, but especially Ren, our narrator. As with the best narrators she is somewhat unreliable but always interesting. I'm glad I found this book and will look for more by Emma Newman

Other reviewers' gripes about this book are all more or less legitimate. In particular, it's a pretty lame conceit to use a first-person narrator who constantly hints at relevant and traumatic past events but won't actually reveal them (because then there'd be no suspense and no book). Initially, I also found the protagonist's ongoing mental anguish to be more tedious than informative.

BUT. About halfway through, there's an important and unexpected plot twist that really changes the nature of the book. I won't spoil it (though fair warning: other reviewers have), but it's beautifully handled. The last third of the book is quite riveting. Overall, this is a distinctive and well written book that blends science fiction and psychology in an unusual way. Recommended!

I read Planetfall in one sitting.

Mind. Blown.

The story starts many years after the crew landed, which they call Planetfall. The handpicked colonists of scientists build their homes at the base of the alien structure. Suh-Mi disappeared into the structure during their initial exploration and the colonists hold a vigil at its entrance for her triumphant return.

Renata is one of the original colonists on a new planet. Lee Suh-Mi, the woman she loved, had a vision of a planet perfect for humanity. Suh-Mi, and her followers escape Earth and its failing resources, overpopulation, and diseases to start over. No one has ever seen this planet but have faith in Suh-Mi’s visions–which includes an alien structure that many believe is a conduit to God.

One morning, an outsider shows up at the colony’s gates. Ren is shocked to learn that Sung-Soo is the Suh-Mi’s grandson. Everyone believed Sung-Soo’s father perished during planetfall. The colony welcomes Sung-Soo with open arms, but Ren doesn’t trust him. Soon he threatens to uncover a secret that will destroy the colony and everything it was built upon.

There’s so many aspects of Planetfall that I loved.

First of all, I love the way Newman builds her world. She weaves details into her characters’ thoughts and interactions. Through Ren’s job, we learn how essential 3-D printers are the colonies. They access patterns from their network to print building materials, clothing, even food. I could easily visualize each person’s home and their roles in the community.

Second is how diverse Newman’s characters are. More importantly, the characters’ ethnicity and their sexual orientation does not drive the plot. This is just who they are. Ren is mixed race and loves women. Other people in the colony are bisexual. I appreciate that diversity is not a big deal. Planetfall reflects our current society, though a bit more enlightened when it comes to marriage and relationships.

A major element of the novel is science versus religion and faith. Newman illustrates that they are in exclusive of the other. Everyone on the colony is a scientist but they are bound together by faith in Suh-Mi’s visions. Each person interprets it differently but this faith doesn’t void science.

Ren is a fascinating character. At first I thought she was an introvert, but she also mental health issues. She has anxiety, panic attacks, and more (as readers will learn later). This affects how she responds to Sung-Soo’s appearance and how she interacts with her community.

I don’t want to give too much of the plot away, but I highly recommend Planetfall by Emma Newman. For those who don’t usually read science fiction, you won’t feel overwhelmed with the science because of how the author introduces the concepts. It’s really a novel about community, hiding secrets, and faith.

Newman unrolls the story slowly, so we get a feel for the fiercely private Ren, who shuns the company of others and flinches away from real intimacy. As things progress, we learn why she is how she is, what her and Suh’s time together looked like, and how someone we learn was so passionate about engineering and leaving Earth to find God’s City could become so reclusive and broken. We get this solid foundation of the character so that what comes later has a profound effect; revelations about how loss and lies can cause a kind of mental and emotional abscess, with Ren burying everything painful she wants to forget under a barrier of literal as well as emotional flotsam.

When the secret comes to light, she must deal with the fallout and save herself. She must figure out what Suh couldn’t.

Planetfall is definitely one of the best books of the year, and belongs on your Christmas buy list.

The main character isn't very likable. There's no action for almost three hundred pages. Nothing HAPPENS. Then boom, story climaxes and it's over. I kept reading it because it seemed so promising but nothing ever came of it.

Renata maintains the 3D printers on a new colony on an alien world, one that was half-religious pilgrimage, lead by her ex-lover and settled at the edge of an alien city that is nearly incomprehensible. For decades the Pathfinder has been gone, and the colony believes she's communing with God inside the city, but there are dark secrets surrounding the Planetfall and when a newcomer arrives to the colony, they threaten to tear Renata apart.

I'd heard that the book involved a main character with a mental illness, and at first I found her to be one of the more relatable protagonists I'd read in a while... which might say some uncomfortable things about me. But I could relate to her anxiety issues and her being uncomfortable around people, particularly when it's a topic she's unprepared for. Eventually, though, the rug is pulled out from under you and you realize that she's a lot worse off than you thought, and some offhanded references were actually signs you missed. In that way, it seems like it's a particularly effective exploration of the phenomenon, how somebody can get so bad and go without help, without people even noticing. This part of the storyline does threaten to overwhelm the book at time and turn into a preachy "trying to help someone who won't accept it" story, but by the end it works together mostly well, save for one bit I'll discuss later.

Other than the mental illness content, there is of course the wider SF plot, and it works surprisingly well. The mysteries of the city are engaging, the author does one of the best jobs I've seen in a while of incorporating and extrapolating social media in a SF environment, and the 3D printing technology thread running through everything is really cool. I had some worries, what with the character who was said to be communing with God, and the fact that they were led to the planet by a revelation, that the science fictional aspect would give way to mysticism and psionic powers, two things that typically sour me on a SF novel, but, for the most part this was handled excellently... until the end, which again, we'll get to in a bit.

The characters? Well, aside from Renata, sometimes they were undeveloped or bordered on caricatures, but the handful of main characters were done well enough that I wasn't bothered.

All in all, I was ready to give it four stars... up until the ending. Without spoiling, it felt as though the author just dropped some of the plots in progress and abandoned everything they were building for, for a shock revelation and some kind of ending that seemed out of nowhere and to not really end things. Even the struggle for the main character to accept help felt like it was rendered irrelevant by what happened, both immediately before the ending, and the actual ending, which crossed over that line into mysticism. To be honest, I'm not even 100% sure I understand what the author was going for there, it felt like maybe I missed something, but if I did (and I'm not sure I did), I think it was done in such a way that I'm still willing to blame the author, not myself. I would have happily read a little bit longer of book that had an ending that actually felt connected to the rest of the story, but here, it came just too fast and too out of left field (and, still, too left the story I'd been engaged in completely unfinished in my mind) that I can only give it three stars. Still, what came before that was done well enough that the author's on my radar for the future.

The writing was entertaining and pace was good. The story line was promising. The story would be stronger, in my opinion, with more explaination of the hoarding and strained mystery of the odd “city’s” purpose.

So much strangeness in this off world colony. Lots to love and hard to put down once the climax arrives. Best part: the many flaws in the narrator. Worst part: same figure almost always nauseated, tasting bile, vomiting, "feeling nauseous". Enough already.

Planetfall by Emma Newman is a sci-fi adventure that took me completely by surprise. I was fascinated by the realistic portrayal of planet colonization via 3D printing, but found so much more to the story than I expected. If you're looking for compelling characters and mysteries with fast-pacing and a great hypothesis of how we could settle other planets, don't miss Planetfall.

"Planetfall" is a great story of colonisation, mental illness and spirituality. Renata is a new type of hero: flawed and self-doubting, but ultimately tougher and smarter than she realises. A book that doesn't quite go where you want it to go, but that's OK: I was glad for the journey. Fresh, haunting and satisfying.

What a wonderful story - great world building and fascinating characters. I guess the ending sort of left me hanging but not in a bad way. I need to know what happens in 20 years...yes I read After Atlas too and it is fantastic.

A few of the other reviews have described ths book as a tragedy, and it is, but it also isn't. I found the ending hopeful, though how one feels about it may depend upon who you are and how you approach things. The book is also partly a mystery, partly a thriller, and easily the best piece of science fiction I've read in years.

Planetfall was absolutely nothing like I was expecting. Yes, it's set in a future where colonists have uncovered a new planet and 3D printing is a way of life, but this is the kind of science fiction which adds depth to the story rather than being the focal point of it.

Planetfall is actually equal parts psychological thriller -- the kind of film where there are lots of close-ups of the heroine's eyes and sudden camera angle twists -- and character study. It's a great thriller -- I read the whole thing with a gradually increasing sense of unease. As the story goes on we become less and less sure whether Renata Ghali, our heroine, is the real danger or if it's the people or world around her where the problem lies. The claustrophobic atmosphere is brilliantly captured by Newman. Planetfall is also a book about loss. Ren has lost a lot, we find out as the story progresses: her parents, planet, girlfriend, daughter and -- best friend and the love of her life -- Suh-Mi, the Pathfinder. Planetfall is a beautiful study of grief, grieving and denial.

The book has a wonderfully diverse cast. Ren herself is a British-Ghanan bisexual and mental health issues (which to my eyes, appeared to be anxiety and OCD, but I could be wrong). All of which seemed well handled.

The last 10% (or so) -- after the unveiling of Ren's secrets and the mysterious past -- takes a slightly strange turn which didn't really feel like it fit with the rest of the story. All in all, though, Planetfall had me hooked throughout and is the kind of story I think will stay with you.