Review - Atlas Alone by Emma Newman

Atlas Alone
Emma Newman
Gollancz, 18 April 2019
PB, 320pp, e-book

I'm grateful to the publisher for a free advance e-copy of Atlas Alone via NetGalley. Quotes are from the advance copy so the final text may differ.

This review contains some spoilers for earlier books in Newman's Planetfall sequence. Especially, if you haven't read After Atlas or Before Mars, stop NOW and read those two books next, then come back.

Atlas Alone is the fourth book in Newman's sequence, and the first that is a direct sequel (to After Atlas). The four share a timeline and take place in the same universe, characterised by an Earth gone to the bad, and a neural chip technology allowing users to link their minds, receive and manipulate data in virtual spaces, experience immersive video games, and record their interior lives.

In Planetfall,we saw a human colony on a  remote world, to which people had travelled (aboard a ship called Atlas) on a voyage masterminded by the mysterious "Pathfinder', Lee Suh-Mi, a women who had visions of either a God or of aliens, which gave her the technology to make the voyage possible. After Atlas, an SF-crime mash up written from the point of view of indentured detective Carl,  explored the consequences for Earth of this mission having left, and also introduced Dee, the principal character in Atlas Alone, and Travis. Before Mars was set on a Mars base at around the same time as After Atlas.

At the end of After Atlas, Carl, Dee and Travis escape Earth on a second Atlas. As they leave, they discover that the planet has been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust - something kept from most of Atlas 2's passengers. There can be no return. There will no further Atlases, or any help from home. Atlas 2 is alone.

As Atlas Alone opens, Dee is coming to terms (or rather, not coming to terms) with the consequences of this. She believes that those guilty of Earth's destruction are aboard the ship, and wants to hunt them down and punish them. But the organisation of the ship is mysterious. It's not really clear who is in charge, why the three are aboard, or what is planned for the future. Each of them has a small cabin, minimal possessions - and a twenty year journey ahead.

Like the other Planetfall books, this story is very much seen from the perspective of a single character - here Dee - and is as much about portraying that character's history, psychology and motivation as it is about external plot. Again, Newman succeeds magnificently in this. Dee is a complex, damaged individual ('Making proper friends is something other people do'). She experienced many traumas as a young woman in the 2030s when the world she knew was consumed by riots and political crisis, leading to the fall of democracy and the rise of the 'gov-corps'. This trauma isn't explained in detail: we see some of it through the games/ simulations - "mersives" - that she takes part in and see is recalled.

In particular there's the experience of "hot-housing" - Dee and Carl both fell into the hands of slavers whose business was to condition and sculpt young minds to perform superlatively at some task and them to sell them on to corporate buyers. This dark experience is recalled a number of times. It has given Dee certain skills, but robbed her of the ability to trust, made her terrified of admitting any vulnerability and damaged her in other ways too, which only slowly become clear. ('They trained me to hide what I thought and felt, and the whole time they thought they were removing those feelings altogether').

This interior portrait of a frightened, emotionally choked yet highly capable woman is chilling and at the same time deeply sad. It makes this book absolutely riveting, if often grim reading (Newman did similar things with Carl in After Atlas, and also in Planetfall) and, I'd say, sets a new standard for a convincing and psychologically vulnerable character. Because of course, despite what Dee must make herself believe to keep going ("My face is a mask in front of a mask") she IS vulnerable...

The book is also notable for the rage it conveys at privilege and injustice: while Atlas 2 does offer escape from a literal Hell on Earth, it isn't some idealistic colony ship travelling to establish a new Eden (unless you believe a new Eden would be a white dominated, slave society). But what to do about that? Dee may have found someone who is willing to help, but she has, to put it mildly, trust issues, knowing, absolutely KNOWING, that everyone will eventually let her down - but also, accepting that as fact and working with it ('Do I really want to play in a mersive created by someone who clearly has dodgy opinions about boundaries? Of course I do').

I wasn't surprised at all that I really enjoyed this book. As ever, the writing is sharp with telling observations on society ('I hold my hands still at my sides, school my face into showing what all men like this want to see: agreement admiration') and the Planetfall universe is engaging and credible. Giving everyone neural chips may be a fairly conventional SF idea, but the way Newman gets us inside the heads of damaged characters with recognisable psychologies means she pulls off a kind of literary equivalent of the neural chip idea. And there's a big, deliberately unresolved idea at the centre of this book that left me reeling. Issues of trust, boundaries and control dominate, leading to questions about when it is justifiable to try and 'fix' someone if they refuse to accept the 'fix'. For the duration of the book you are Dee, you feel what she feels, suffer as she suffers and as her certainties begin to crumble, so do yours, until finally, well... you'll have to read the book to find out.

One final point: shortly before Atlas Alone was published, a well known UK author of lithic gave his opinion that novelists might explore "human dilemmas of being close up to something that you know to be artificial but which thinks like you". I couldn't give a better description of this book.

Simply outstanding. You have to read this.

Review - Before Mars by Emma Newman

Cover design by Adam Auerbach

Before Mars (Planetfall 3)
Emma Newman
Gollancz, 19 April 2018
PB, 352pp

I'm SO grateful to Kate for passing me her proof of this book (see her review here).

This is the third book set in Newman's Planetfall series, following Planetfall itself and After Atlas. Planetfall is set on a distant world some time after it was colonised by humans aboard the ship Atlas. After Atlas shows what happened on Earth after that ship departed, and Before Mars is a companion, happening alongside After Atlas but, as the site suggests, on Mars where the main character, Anna Kubrin, has travelled to paint and to geologise. (If you've read After Atlas that will give you an idea of some of the events here, although you don't need to have done to appreciate this book).

When I say Kubrin is the "main character" here, that is probably understating her role. Why she has gone to Mars, what she leaves behind and why she is as she is are all issues that preoccupy the unfolding story. As in Planetfall, there is an aspect to Kubrin's personality and history that is gradually revealed and which answers a question I asked myself early on - why has she gone to Mars? The colony there - a handful of people - is ostensibly carrying out research, though really it seems to be more of a setting for a reality TV show, but the idea of going there to paint seems bizarre even in a future where everything seems to be run by oligarchs ("gov corps") at least one of whom is quixotic enough to send an artist all that way.

Newman excels here in putting across exactly what Anna is like, what she is running from and what she is looking for. Without wishing to speculate too wildly I think there are some deeply personal things being explored here and it must have taken great courage to write parts of this book. I hope nobody finds that off-putting - the result is a convincing and deeply human protagonist who would be fascinating even outside the pages of a gripping SF story, which this is. In a genre sometimes criticised (fairly or not) for flat characters and tech-based storytelling, this book stands out as a penetrating character study.

It is also, as I said above, a gripping SF story. There are mysteries here. Upon arrival on Mars, Anna discovers a note to herself warning her against one of the crew. then she finds that her neural chip has apparently been hacked, allowing her very memories to be used to send her messages. All of this makes her worry that she may be losing her grip on reality in the same way her father did. And that's before a certain AI begins misbehaving (shades of 2001 here).

Occupying a corner of the Planetfall universe and calling back to some of the same events referred to in the earlier books, this is nevertheless a fairly standalone story albeit one that - I hope - points to further instalments ahead. I certainly hope so: Newman can certainly spin a tale and is second to none in creating real, human, fallible and credible characters.

The author's website is here. I reviewed Planetfall here and After Atlas here. Originally published in the US, they are both now available in the UK, published by Gollancz alongside Before Mars.

Review: After Atlas by Emma Newman

Image from http://www.enewman.co.uk/

After Atlas
Emma Newman
Roc, 10 November 2016
PB, 365pp

Source: Copy bought from Forbidden Planet at author signing (see below)

Emma Newman continues to impress me with her smart, slightly twisted takes on SF - in this case, she asks "what about those left behind?"

The earlier book, Planetfall, set in the same universe as After Atlas, focussed on human settlers to a new world some 20 years in. It showed how they had been drawn there by almost religious fervour, and what happened next - with a startling twist. The concept reminded me of classic Star Trek except for the deep, empathetic portrayal of the main character and her weaknesses which gave the book so much heart.

Now, we're back on Earth at the same time (I think) as the Planetfall events. We see the awful place earth has become, which the colonists on Atlas wanted to escape. The remorseless march or corporatism has swallowed governments, which have become "gov-corps". Everyone is surveilled all the time, most people have chips embedded and there seem to be no human rights, only contracts - and some are trapped by those contracts into something not far off slavery.

Carlos is one such. Owned by the Ministry of Justice in the UK, he's been trained and formed ('hot-housed') into the perfect criminal investigator. He will work to 80 or thereabouts to repay the cost of his purchase with any failure, any rebellion punished by extra years on the contract. Yet as we find out later he has an easy time compared to some.

Carlos is brought in to solve a high profile case involving the leader of a religious sect - the Circle - from the US. The Circle consists of the people left behind when Atlas flew - one of whom was Carlos's mother (Newman makes a telling point that there's more blame heaped on the mother who left her child than the many fathers). he used to be a member of the Circle so he's ideally placed to understand what happened in a remote hotel in Devon. (The case also gives him the chance to enjoy real - non printed - food: Carlos's love of good food is an enjoyable diversion against a fairly grim background).

The book then adopts the mode - if not the normal setting - of a police procedural, with forensics, pathology, the search for evidence and a rising sense that something is off, someone isn't playing by the rules. We gradually come to sympathise with Carlos more and more, not least the grief and anger which he is clearly bottling up - assisted by the lessons from his hot-housing. He's an awkward, slightly spiky character and so, so alone.

Then - things change. I can't say too much about this for fear of spoilers but the book moves into a different mode. Something awful happens to Carlos and the stakes are suddenly much higher. Then Newman redoubles the jeopardy yet again, boosting things both to a new level of danger but also changing the sort of book this is in a heartbreaking conclusion. I was left standing in the dark on a cold railway platform so that I could read the last few pages before I drove home - it's that compelling. This is, in short, a compulsive and disturbing read. As well as sheer, relentless story we get to see the lives of those shut out of the glamorous space adventure described in Planetfall. Of course we know how that turned out - they don't, and many are damaged: Carlos's father, driven to grief and despair, for example. That's an angle on space-faring and the Final Frontier that you don't normally see.

It isn't perfect - I wonder if perhaps that first twist might come a bit sooner, as there is relatively little time then to explore the consequences? Things then seem a bit rushed at the end. But it's a testament to the power of the writing that I'm only saying that in hindsight: when you're in this book you just want it to keep coming and coming.

The best thing of all is, though, that there surely MUST be more books to come now in the Planetfall universe? It can't just end like this, can it? Please Emma?

The author reading from After Atlas at Forbidden Planet London
(12 November 2016)