i09: Newman does a fantastic job…incredibly well-realized world-building, showing a realistic (semi) post-scarcity society on another world…Newman has a real gift for depicting people’s capacity for naivete and viciousness, and how the two things often go together. Planetfall will ultimately mess with your head. It draws you in with such a well-realized world that by the time you start to realize that its main character isn’t quite who you thought she was, you’re already fully inhabiting her skin. (The device of having a first-person narrator who withholds information from the reader is a risky one, which could horribly backfire—but in this story about repressed truths and terrible secrets, it absolutely works and feels natural and honest.) There were a few points in Planetfall where I was like, “What the hell just happened?”—in a good way. And by the time you get to the last of those, this book that appeared to be sort of a cozy story of exoplanet colonization will have started to seem like something much more urgent and thrilling.
Nov 242015