Friday, June 19, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Planetfall by Emma Newman


Planetfall is a 2015 SciFi/Fantasy novel by author Emma Newman, and the first in a series of connected novels which was nominated for this year's Hugo Award for Best Series.  I'd missed the novel when it first came out, despite it getting a decent amount of acclaim (probably because I'd just started my increase in SF/F reading around that time), but the entire series is included in the Hugo Packet, so better now than never.

And Planetfall is pretty interesting, even if I'm not sure I really liked it?  It's a SciFi story focused upon a main character - a woman who is one of two members of a colony on a foreign planet who knows the terrible secret and lie behind their colony, and has spent the last two decades suffering mentally trying to hold it all in.  It's very much about the mental illness of its protagonist, as the secrets she bears exacerbates what might have already been there once as outside influences - a stranger with ties to the past - pick at the scab until its all done.  And for that it's well done, but even as I grew to care about this protagonist and found the book engrossing, I'm not really sure the ending really worked for me?  It's...interesting.


-------------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------------
It has been 20 years since Planetfall, when the colony built at the foot of God's City was established.   Renata "Ren" Ghali is one of two people - just her and the colony's leader Mack - who knows the true story behind its founding, and what happened to Ren's love - the "Pathfinder" Lee "Suh" Suh-Mi.  As far as the rest of the colony knows, Suh is still out there inside God's City, communing with God, and she will one day return.  But the truth is far darker, and it has been tearing up Ren inside for 20 years.

And then a stranger named Lee Sung-Soo arrives - Suh's grandson - from the wastelands surrounding the colony, where no human should be alive on this alien planet.  For Sung-Soo, the colony is seemingly a wonder, where they can print whatever they need, and live in peace and enjoyment, as opposed to the bitter harsh life he must have survived outdoors.  For Ren, Sung-Soo's arrival only causes her to relive her memories of his grandmother, the woman she loved and still loves - memories that threaten to turn her apart.

Sung-Soo's arrival suggests that things are about to change, and the secret may not be kept hidden for much longer.  And for Ren, the only thing that could be worse than suffering in silence for 20 years is what might happen when it's all exposed, and the truth of who Ren is is open for all to see...............
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Planetfall is an interesting book because it's not really about what you might think it is.  Yes it's a SciFi novel about a colony on an alien planet with a hidden secret, a secret that might have resulted in the deaths of others in the past, others who may not be as dead as previously thought.  But the book isn't interested in really the idea of whether keeping that secret was right or wrong, or whether the actions involved in the secret were justified (non-spoiler: they weren't).

No, Planetfall is the story of Ren, a woman who has suffered from mental illness as a result of what happened - and as a result of keeping that secret all these years.  It's really the story of what keeping such a truth will do to such a person, and the story makes it clear that it's not good.  Ren is a compelling narrator, and she's the sole reason the story works: she's far more capable than she herself or some others from her past would realize, skilled at using the Printers to create whatever is needed, and is someone who everyone in the colony trusts. At the same time, she's clearly broken, in ways that are slowly revealed to the reader (so I will not spoil too much) as the story develops: she refuses to let anyone else inside her home, she can't help but explore parts of the Alien "City" without tellingi anyone in search of some meaning, and she finds herself absolutely haunted by the past.

And that's the key to this story, of how Ren is unable to deal with the past in any way.  She is triggered by memories constantly, when she enters various places in the colony in her normal course of business to when she just carries out her duties.  And Sung-Soo, whose face resembles Suh's so much, only makes this worse.  The secret that Ren carries inside her tears at her, and while she's hidden it from everyone else because they all respect her privacy, Sung-Soo is an outsider and doesn't have that distance: and so Ren's mental pain becomes brutally clear for all to see.

Needless to say, as you'd expect in any book setup like this, the secret is eventually exposed, and Newman does an excellent job revealing it to the reader in drips.  But the secret itself isn't the point of the novel, what it's done to a person - particularly Ren - is the point.  And so it all leads up to an ending where the setting is drastically changed, in which nothing will ever be the same....and yet the ending doesn't really care about that (and the book's sequel doesn't look like it will follow up on that).  What it cares about instead is Ren's epiphany towards the end, as she finds the path that Suh started down all so long ago and finds some meaning in it all, in an end.  It's an ending that's okay I guess and kind of fits but well...it seems almost magical in its thinking more than anything and the ambiguity involved it made me shrug more than anything.

I will read the sequel to this book, since it did keep me engrossed enough to read it in under 24 hours.  But I'm not really sure I found it interesting enough to think too much about even shortly after finishing in the end, so it's not inspiring me to think of putting it too high on my Best series ballot.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)