Planetfall

[sawyl]

During her GoH interview at Bristolcon back in 2014, Emma Newman mentioned that she'd just sold a science fiction novel inspired by ideas about synthetic biology, a particular psychological disorder, and something she'd read about 3D printing on the moon. Now, with Planetfall just published, it is finally possible to see how Emma Newman has blended the ideas together to create superb, compelling planetary romance.

Set in a small human colony on a distant alien world twenty years after landing, Planetfall begins with Renata Ghali, the resident engineer and geneticist, receiving an urgent call from Cillian Mackenzie, the town's de facto head. A young man has been detected walking towards the town; an impossibility, given the loss of all the other human colonisation party in a shuttle accident. The man, Lee Sung-Soo, turns out to be the grandson of Lee Suh-Mi, the colony's messianic founder who has spent the last two decades sequestered inside a vast alien structure nicknamed God's City.

When Mack announces the arrival of a new resident, the locals are delighted and vote to accept him. Ren, as resident 3D printer specialist, helps build Sung-Soo a new house while the rest of the colony showers him with gifts and hold a communal event akin to a barn raising to welcome him to the settlement. In attempting to make friends with the fragile and insular Ren, Sung-Soo oversteps the local cultural boundaries — the town-dwellers, having spent a long time cooped up on their colony ship, are pathologically unwilling to intrude on each other's privacy — and puts his fingers on some of the engineer's most emotionally sensitive spots. Couple this with Mack's on-going worries about the annual ceremony of the seed and his desire to prevent Sung-Soo from being nominated as the next year's candidate for the ceremony, and suddenly the colony is in a state of precarious imbalance.

A first person narrative, everything in Planetfall is mediated through Ren's perspective. Unfortunately, it becomes clear from the very first paragraph, in which Ren relates an unpleasant memory of a conversation with her mother, that the narrator is carrying an awful lot of baggage. Consequently there are key pieces of information about the colony that Ren knows but which she is unable to relate because her memories of them are so painful that she's unable to revisit them. While this might seem unfair, it's completely in keeping with a character who seems to have raised denial and suppression to an artform in order to cope with a whole series of agonising decisions, starting with the complete abandonment of her home, parents, and past, and getting worse from there.

It also becomes apparently fairly quickly that Ren isn't a reliable narrator. Again, this isn't the result of malice or active deception. Rather it's the case that what Ren has chosen to define as normal is very different to other people's definitions, so some of the details she overlooks are only overlooked because from her distorted perspective, they're completely mundane. This results a series of turning points when the reader, watching over Ren's shoulder, has a chance to see one of the more neurotypical characters react with horror to something that Ren considers completely normal that we realise just how strange her outlook is and how complicit we've become in accepting her world view.

Newman does an excellent job with Ren, making her sympathetic without diminishing her spiky and slightly difficult personality. She also does an excellent job of showing how someone can continue to function, apparently normally, despite battling a serious psychological disorder. And because we have privileged access to Ren's thoughts, we can see the things she tells herself to justify her inability to do things, and we can see her genuine fear when confronted with some of her memories; I particularly like Ren's comment, reflected through a memory of her father helping her through the panic attacks she had as a child, of her worry that not only will she not be able to find a physical space that makes her feel safe but that the contents of her mind are so disturbing that she can't even feel safe inside her own head.

The other characters, principally Mack and Sung-Soo are well drawn and convincing. Mack, the master manipulator, used to be a top advertising man back on Earth and has been tagged as the colony's Ringmaster, directing the show while Ren sees to the rigging and the lights to keep everything running smoothly. Sung-Soo, like John Savage in Brave New World, is the catalyst that shakes up the complacent world of the colony by combining pleasant manners with a completely different set of personal boundaries.

Lee Suh-Mi, the great gaping absence at the heart of the narrative, gradually appears as Ren is pushed to dig through her memories of the past. It's clear that for all Ren's intelligence and Mack's drive, it is Suh's vision, imparted to her in a strange coma back on Earth, that has pushed the mission forward and which continues to keep the settlers camped on the outskirts of the mysterious biomechanism that is God's City, waiting to hear the word from their Pathfinder.

There's so much more I'd like to say about Planetfall, but it's hard to talk about them without spoiling the beautifully clever moments of inflection where someone says something to Renata or does something in her presence that completely reshapes the reader's understanding of the plot thus far. Suffice to say that the characters are excellent, the world is fascinating, and the plot really pushes forward with an irresistible momentum. And while the are answers at the very last, Newman has the courge of her convictions and they aren't the simple, easy, trite answers that genre writers sometimes feel compelled to offer up.