Thursday, August 13, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Before Mars by Emma Newman


Before Mars is the third novel in Emma Newman's Planetfall series, which was nominated for this year's Hugo Award for Best Series.  I've had kind of mixed feelings about the series (my review of book 1 is HERE and book 2 is HERE), which has featured a dystopian scifi universe and a couple of main characters dealing with deep mental trauma stemming in part from tragedies in their pasts, which come to light over the course of their plots.  On one hand, both main characters in the first two books have been very strong, and have carried fascinating scifi plots - the first the tale of a colony on an alien planet with a secret past, the second a noir mystery in a dystopian Earth run by corporates and featuring powerful cults - so as to make the books incredibly readable.  On the other hand, both books kind of ended on serious downer notes and left me very ambivalent about the point of it all, especially the second book After Atlas.

Before Mars is unfortunately more of the latter and very little of the former - to the point where I'm not sure why it exists at all, except maybe if the characters involved are to pop up later in the series.  Taking place at around the same time as book 2 in the series, After Atlas, it shifts the setting to Mars and its main character to a new woman who has her own mental trauma from a tragic past and a life that she just can't seem to live the way others expect.  But while the book's prose remains very readable, allowing for me to read through it rather quickly, the plot revolves around mysteries and questions about the main character's possible madness that are way too predictable in the end....and feel very redundant after similar mysteries showed up in the last book - with the 2nd book's ending forming a climatic event here.  As such, it almost feels like this could have been written as an alternate 2nd novel in the series, but with the actual 2nd novel existing separately, it's hard to tell what purpose this book serves.

Note:  Each novel in the series features plot points related to the others, but has not - three books in - relied upon the reader having any foreknowledge of the prior ones.  That's still the case here, so this book can be read as a stand alone if you want, skipping the other two novels.

--------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------------
Geologist Anna Kubrin has finally arrived on Mars after months of travel.  The small installation there, owned by multi-gazillionaire Stefan Gabor, is home to only four other occupants - 2 scientists, a doctor and a psychiatrist - and is most known these days for the produced television show by one of the scientists which Anna was a big fan of back on Earth.  Anna isn't sure what to expect from Mars, having managed to get there in a non-standard way: her hobby of painting caught the eye of Gabor himself and she's supposed to create such art on Mars so as to earn a lot of money for Gabor, even if she'd rather study the planet's rocks then commit entirely to painting.

Moreover, Anna has spent the last few years feeling like she wasn't living the life everyone else expected from her - with a loving child and husband who she just can't feel the right emotions towards, and a tragic past that has left her unmoored from the rest of her family.  She has spent the trip to Mars in full 3d immersion in her videotaped memories, and feels sometimes like she can't tell the difference between immersion and reality....but if she told anyone that, she'd be considered crazy.  So she tries to keep these feelings inside.....

But when she gets to Mars, and finally disembarks, she finds some things that make her question her sanity:  a note, painted in her own hand, warning her not to trust the psychiatrist; and a ring, packed in her belongings, that is clearly a forgery of her own wedding ring.  Moreover, the note is clearly written on a missing fourth sketch pad that she remembers packing....even though the manifest says she only packed three pads.  And as Anna begins to explore the installation, she finds Mars feels somehow familiar to her as if she's been there before....and she begins to see things that the installation AI insists are not actually there.

Is Anna actually going mad?  Or is there something else going on in the Mars Installation, something that someone would do anything to prevent Anna from learning?
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New protagonist Anna Kubrin is very similar to our prior series protagonist (Ren and Carlos) in a number of ways.  Like the two of them, she's haunted by a tragic moment in her past - in her case, when her father seemingly tried to kill her mother, having gone mad.  Also like the two of them, she has a mindset that doesn't quite fit that of what is expected of her - in her case, the expectation that she be a happy mother to a young child, with a loving husband she is supposed to care for, to go along with a work and hobby that should provide much more joy.  But Anna finds herself unable to care quite in the way that she's supposed to - she doesn't dislike her child, but she just doesn't feel the motherly joy she's seemingly supposed to at all of the firsts that come from her baby.  Moreover, she finds herself disassociated from what is going on around her, as if it's not really happening - a problem when comparing her experiences to that of immersed memories, which she frequently spends her time immersed in.

It's a character that works - Newman is at this point clearly really damn good at building up main characters with different mental states from the norm and making them sympathetic, to say nothing of showing how others' responses to their mental states only makes things worse for those characters.  It's not too dissimilar a detail to what she did with the first book's protagonist, Ren, only the idea of mothers who don't experience motherhood the same way as others is the character type this time around, and it's a certainly real phenomena in our current world that isn't really understood by most people.

Unfortunately, that's about the only part of this book that works, and it can't quite carry everything.  Newman's prose is still somehow very readable in a way I can't explain, so I got through this book very quickly.  But all the mysteries the plot tries to conjure up are either utterly laughable or fail to provide satisfying answers - mainly because the answers are the exact same as the ones we had in book 2.  Readers of that book are aware of what happens to the Earth around the time period of this novel, and will be awaiting it happening here....so when it does happen in a way to cause confusion, the reader is entirely aware of what's going on and isn't intrigued.  The mystery of how Anna could have painted a warning to herself is obviously one of a few possible things - memory loss, actually being in immersion the whole time, or time travel, and really only one of these things is plausible in this universe.  And the rest of the mysteries, of what's really going on in Mars, all lead to the exact same answers as were found in the last book, which isn't too surprising since the person behind Anna's trip to Mars and the planet itself is the same rich billionaire (Gabor) as was a major antagonist in that book.

If you had skipped from book 1 to this book in this series, you would probably enjoy this book a lot more - the mysteries would suddenly be intriguing and their answers possibly surprising, with the climactic event being a mystery to the reader until the reveal.  And Anna's own mental trauma is probably more similar to the first book's protagonist (Ren) than the second book's (Carlos), although her tragic backstory is sort of related to Carlos' and another aspect of Carlos' tragic backstory recurs with another character here - but again, that only makes it feel stale here, whereas it'd feel fresh if you hadn't read the second book.  It thus makes me really wonder if this was originally intended to be the follow up to Planetfall, because it probably would work as such, in an alternate way as After Atlas wound up doing.

But After Atlas WAS the follow up the Planetfall, and since it exists, and most readers of this book will have come from that novel, this book is only going to provide an absolutely frustrating experience for most readers.  It did for me at least, so unless these characters recur in future books - and so far none have - then I just don't get why Before Mars even exists...a book should never feel like an outtake from an alternate draft, and this just really does.
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