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Planetfall Is a SFnal Exploration of the Messy Architecture of Grief
There’s a circling quality to Emma Newman’s Planetfall, a sense the narrator is spiraling into the heart of the matter, while at the same time everything is spinning out of control. This centrifuge spins forward and backward in time, from origin to consequences. We meet Rhenata Ghali outside of the mashers, where discarded 3D printed items go to be recycled to make new ones. She’s fishing out broken things that could potentially be repaired, or items that show the particular quirks of their owners. You don’t realize what a strange activity this is until later, after you’ve met Ren’s small community.
A thousand-odd people live in this colony on a distant planet, at the foot of an uninhabited alien structure. They have all followed Ren’s college roommate and seer Lee Suh-Mi across the universe to find god. They’ve been waiting at the base of god’s city (as they call the immense structure) since the day they first landed, waiting for Suh to return and deliver the word of god. Theirs is a sleepy, almost incurious community, all of their needs met by the printers, from medicine to shelter, food to electronics. There is no need to repair things, or work, and everything has wound down into a round of social calls. Then one morning, a young man walks into town, and shakes everything up.
Ships in 1-2 days.
Sung-Soo is the son of another colonist. They were part of a group that was lost, presumed dead, at planetfall 22 years prior, when the first batch of colonists left their interstellar ship and came spiraling down to the planet. Mack and Ren, who find the boy, conspire about how to introduce this young man to their community while maintaining the secret of what really happened all those years ago. Whatever it is—whatever Ren skitters from whenever she gets close to talking about it—was bad, bad enough to destroy the community if revealed.
Sung-Soo stands in harsh relief with the other colonists. He was raised by technologically advanced people who were abandoned with little more than camping equipment on an harsh, unfamiliar world, while those in the settlement lived in post-scarcity, with every conceivable need met by the miraculous printers. There’s a stagnant feel of complacency to the settlement, which Sung-Soo revitalizes in many ways, providing an excuse for parties and visits, conversation and reflection. He expresses curiosity and wonder at all the things they take for granted.
There are damaged narrators, and then there are damaged narrators, and Ren is both. Planetfall has a beautiful narrative voice, ripe with the tics and avoidances of a woman who has been fished out of the masher, but never rightly repaired. At one point Ren rescues a half-knitted doll from the maw, something that isn’t so much broken as incomplete. She sets to finishing it, teaching herself to knit, raveling and unraveling the yarn until she gets it right. This is Ren—her story— and the story of Planetfall at its most granular. She’s been rescued from oblivion, but her salvation is made of torn stitches and lost threads, ultimately a simulacrum—a toy. She playing as herself.
She’s odd with Sung-Soo, moreso than she is odd with everyone else, withholding and secretive. But there’s an edge of supplication and entreaty in her dealings with the boy, partially because of the secret of whatever happened all those years ago, and partially because he hasn’t been trained, like the community, to respect the hard boundaries she’s put around her inner life. (These boundaries, in some cases, are literal: she has perimeter warnings all around her house in a community where people seem to wander into and out of others’ homes regularly.) He trips all the proximity warnings, but he reminds her of Suh, her dear friend, and the reason why they are all there, at the foot of god’s city.
The mystery consumed me. I haven’t had this experience reading, really, ever. I somehow forced myself to bed when I was about halfway through. I woke up at three in the morning and read all the way to the end, even my sleeping mind absolutely dying to see what was hiding behind Ren’s teetering wall of deflection and denial. Then I was devastated, sitting alone in my dark house.
Planetfall is available now.