Planetfall

Loved it. A nontraditional protagonist along the lines of Remnant Population.

4.5*

This book was a RIDE. Sooo many different levels of goodness here! It is a great example of why I love speculative fiction so much. Yes, it is a story about a group of humans colonizing a new planet. It is also really a story about humans and how our minds work (and break) and how we can walk a fine line between striving and insanity. This book was so well-written and suspenseful, I was pulled along until the very end. The ending was so satisfying to me I was sad to realize this book was part of a series. (Like, hard to imagine improving on that ending?) But luckily it seems that the other books are written in the same universe but with different casts of characters and I am SO IN to read those books!

Wow! This book did not go where I thought it would. Really powerful story. A lot was said about mental illness without it being preachy. I just wish it wasn't the person who came to destroy the colony that found it out. And, I for once, read a Sword and Laser book at the same time as the group did.

Good book. Read it, don't get spoiled first. Beware of rando flower seed.

This was the book club pick for July, yet another book that was completely off of my radar. I had surprisingly few notes, Planetfall is a competent SF mystery with a mentally ill narrator. The novel is packed with interesting speculation and subscribes to the 3D printer future of the Bobiverse and Snow Crash. There's really only one thing holding this book back and that's Emma Newman's commitment to a “grand reveal” that managed to surprise no one. Oh and the pacing kind of sucks.

Planetfall is the first novel in the Planetfall series but I think anyone who picks this novel up will be forgiven if they feel the need to double-check since the bulk of this story is set 20 years after colonists land on a planet. These colonists have traveled an undisclosed distance to settle on this planet in the hopes of meeting god, who is implied to be resting at the top of a towering bio-mechanical structure that the colonists have called the City of God. I won't spoil the setup any further, but a wrench is thrown into the plan when the grandson of the missions' leader wanders into the colony from the wilderness, a descendant of survivors of one of the botched landing crews.

While this is an SF mystery the core conceit of the novel concerns personal tragedy and mental illness. This is yet another in a spate of books that I have recently read in which some type of disability has featured prominently. The main character and narrator in this story is suffering from an acute bout of hoarding. In Planetfall this feature is simultaneously the book's biggest strength and the source of its weakness. It is RARE that we get such a well-composed and sympathetic glimpse into the mind of a mentally disturbed person; Emma Newman takes us deep into this exploration, and I appreciated this spotlight on the mental element of space exploration. This thread begins and ends with the MC, so it might be a bit of a stretch to call it a larger theme, but most SF works jog right past mental health.

The problem I had with this novel was directly related to the depth of this personal exploration. This is a character-driven story, but we are locked in the head of the narrator to the point of claustrophobia. Call it a narrative device if you want to, but this book's singular focus on the MC's issues meant that details relating to the plot, the setting, and the cast were few and far between for the majority of the story. I don't need a book to spell things out for me, but this is a case where the author intentionally leaves us in the dark so they can progress a personal narrative thread. There are LARGE chunks in this book where nothing is happening. I wouldn't call it a pacing issue so much as an issue of focus, we get a lot of answers concerning the MC's condition but very little concerning the world and her mission past the basics.

I think this book could have redeemed itself with a strong ending, but this book ended just as things were getting interesting. I believe that Emma Newman's other writing gravitates more towards mystery and procedural crime, and her insistence on keeping details close to the chest really did not do this book any favors. The “big reveal” was more focused on the issues of the narrator (issues that we as the reader have known about since the halfway point), the problem being that this focus totally robs the reader of the larger and more interesting goings on of the colony.

I do like the writing overall, and there were moments in this book that captured my imagination (before moving on and leaving the thought half finished). I think that this book suffers a little bit more since it's the beginning of a series. I don't think I've ever read a “first book” with as few details concerning its world as this book does, and the next book in this series precedes the events of this book so it's not much of a setup or an incentive to read the next book. I must say that I am still interested in reading the next book in the series since it's a different flavor (more of a crime/mystery novel than an SF novel).

TL;DR: Hoarders in space. It has its moments, and the subject matter is very unique and inspired. The story has long stretches where nothing is happening, and nothing is revealed. 2.5 /5(3).

The “mystery” aspect really kept me engaged. Interesting themes around mental illness. The colony and their way of life was interesting. I didn't care for the ending.

This is exactly the kind of psychological sci-fi story I live. It's such a nuanced look at grief, guilt, and mental health while also featuring organic alien cities and space colonization. Renata as a main character is brilliant, secretive, and a great person to tell this story. I really enjoyed it, and am definitely keeping an eye on this author.

The first part of the story is very frustrating! So many hints to the world and a backstory but no pauses to expand on the world building or the backstory!

Next it's riding in the head of a hoarder, talk about frustration over how rude and intrusive some people are ! I would not have looked at this situation this way before, so glad the author included it.

Then the roller coaster ride to the end of the book and dang it a cliff hanger that doesn't appear to be answered, based on the synopses of the other books in the series .

I'd recommend this to someone that likes science fiction.

I liked this one a lot. There's something in it that taps into the SF I loved when I was thirteen (which we all know is the real Golden Age of Science Fiction), but that's not to say it's old fashioned* or childish. It's more to do with a sense of wonder and exploration, mystery and revelation. There's a background which is filled in with little drips of information scattered throughout the book, and I wanted to keep reading to find out more about what was going on. The ending goes up and on and out like all the best ones do, leaving you on the brink of a sequel that I kind of hope is never written** (I mean, come on, who remembers any of the Heechee books after Gateway?). There's a kind of pure quality about it, where you can tell it was written by someone who really loves SF, and I can totally get behind that. A good book.


*the narrator is a) a woman and b) hmm...I don't want to say mentally ill, let's go with neurodiverse. Trust me, there was no one matching either description starring in any SF book in the St Budeaux library in the late seventies. Yes, it feels traditional, but let's remember that tradition is an evolving, changing thing. And I speak as someone who willingly listens to folk music, dig?

**yeah, I know there are other books in this universe, but as far as I know they don't directly follow this one

Very good until 3/4 in, then the story falls flat, the ending is abrupt and without any meaningful explanation. Very frustrating, lots of build up for an illogical nothing.

Very interesting story. Not what I expected, definitely. I think the main character, Ren, qualifies as an “unreliable narrator.” The description, from her point of view, of her hoarding disorder was very well done, especially how it related to the backstory of this colony. In most cases I enjoy being tossed into a story and expected to figure things out based on clues in the text, but I did think that some of the background, especially the religious nature of the colony, was a bit thin.

A well written story with a well crafted main character - Ren . The book dealt with the arrival at a planet and the events thereafter; hence the title - Planetfall . However I was frustrated by the vagueness of the pre-story - there were some brief hints and flashbacks, but I would have liked to know more about why the hell they went there, and how the character Suh discovered the planet. Yes I know there was some detail about this, but really, on that basis, would you build a starship and go off into the unknown!