Planetfall

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).