Planetfall

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 […]

A lot of ink, digital and otherwise, is spilled each year as writers—pressured endlessly into coming up with think-pieces—point and laugh at the generations-old predictions science fiction made about the future. Flying cars! We were promised flying cars! Sure, the genre sometimes gets things wrong when it predicts the future, but a surprising number of once science fictional technologies are now […]

As a way to help erase stigma related to mental illnesses, the National Alliance on Mental Illness has designated May as Mental Health Month. According to the NAMI website, 1 in 5 Americans will be affected by a mental health condition in their lifetime, and the more we talk about the subject—even in fantastical contexts—the more we can […]

Emma Newman’s Planetfall is a devastating novel, set among a colony of pilgrims who left Earth to find God on another planet. Set 20 years after the Atlas mission landed, it details the idyllic lives of the missionaries, who while away their days at the edge of an incomprehensible alien structure. They live post-scarcity lives, with every physical need provided for by 3D […]