Emma Newman is a British Fantasy and SF writer and podcaster. Nominated for a British Fantasy Award as best newcomer in 2014 she already has published the urban-fantasy series ‘The Split Worlds’ along with the SF Novels ‘Planetfall’ and ‘Before Atlas’ which was nominated for a Clarke Award in 2017.
The novel ‘Planetfall’ takes place sometime in the not too distant future, in a human colony on a distant, unnamed world some twenty years after the colonist’s arrival, twenty years after planetfall in other words.
The colony was founded by Lee Suh-Mi, a self styled ‘pathfinder’ (Read Messiah) who ‘knew’ that god was waiting on the planet for human beings to come and be with him (her?, it?). Lee Suh-Mi, Suh to her followers, has not been seen since planetfall, she is communing with god in god’s city the colonists have been told. God’s city is an alien structure not far from where the colonists have built their settlement. Here they have been waiting twenty years for the ‘Pathfinder’ to return with god’s message to them.
Renata Ghali, ‘Ren’ is the colony’s manufacturing engineer, that is she takes care of the colony’s 3-D printers that produce everything the colonists require right down to their food. Ren was Suh’s roommate and lover and was present when, back on Earth Suh ate the alien plant that caused her to begin having visions of god.
Cillian Mackenzie ‘Mack’ is the colony’s leader, who has kept the colonists together even after the disaster at planetfall that led to several of the colony’s members becoming lost and presumed dead. Problem is it’s all a lie and Mack and Ren are the only one’s who know the truth.
Right at the start we learn that Ren is not strong psychologically, she has mother issues and was pretty much dependent on Suh even before they ever left Earth. Now however the strain of keeping the lies is really taking its toll on Ren.
Half the fun of ‘Planetfall’ is trying to figure out just what is going on! What happened back at planetfall and just what are all of Ren’s problems? Author Emma Newman does a very good giving you clues here and there so that, as in a mystery novel, you’re soon caught up trying to put all the pieces together.
I think I did pretty well. I figured out what Ren’s big problem was and the hidden cause of it. I also had a good idea of what had happened at planetfall. The climax at the ending however caught me completely by surprise; I never saw it coming. Writers are often told that you want the climax of your novel to be ‘totally unexpected and completely inevitable’. In ‘Planetfall’ Emma Newman succeeds very well in that goal.
‘Planetfall’ isn’t prefect by any means however. The middle sags a bit as it becomes so dominated by Ren’s mental problems that you lose sight of the main plot. Cutting out maybe ten pages worth of groaning and moaning would be a bit of an improvement. Then at the very end as Ren passes the alien ‘tests’ that Suh failed you can’t quite believe it, she’s been such a neurotic mess the entire novel after all.
I may be a little biased toward liking ‘Planetfall’ because I’ve been working on a novel idea about a group of religious ‘pilgrims’ traveling into outer space in order to pursue their vision of god for a long time. Still ‘Planetfall’ is a well-crafted SF mystery that, once you get started you’ll have to finish in order to not only find out how the story ends, but how it started as well!
