A scary detail is that people Carl meets during the course of his investigation don’t realise he is a slave. Carl escaped, but was rounded and sold into white-collar slavery his skills enabling him to become a police detective. Carl’s mother departed on Atlas, leaving her son in the care of a neglectful, broken father whose response was to join an anti-technology cult led by the dauntingly charismatic Alejandro Casales.
One person who couldn’t be less interested in the contents is hot-housed super-detective Carlos Moreno. Nothing has been heard from Atlas in the decades since, although a time capsule left by the mission is due to be opened. Its mission was defined by a woman called the Pathfinder, whose consumption of a strange seed gave her the coordinates of a distant planet that was the supposed location of the City of God. It’s been forty years since the starship Atlas left Earth with the brightest of humanity and a big chunk of the planet’s most valuable raw materials. However, the first novel casts its eerie light over proceedings in the second, lending them that shivery sense of the uncanny that all good murder/detective fiction has only with even more intensity. You don’t have to read ‘Planetfall’ to appreciate the very different ‘After Atlas’. Nailing a multi-layered, confessional Frederik Pohl meets Sylvia Plath tale of celestial intrigue on a distant colony planet, its transcendent conclusion appeared to preclude any possible follow-up. I could rant on about ‘Planetfall’ for hours it was my Book of the Year for 2015 and I recommend it to anyone, regardless of whether they like science fiction or not. Able to switch from Regency fantasy (the Split Words novels) and Hugo Award-winning genre comedy (the Tea & Jeopardy podcast) to the otherworldly beauty of her first SF novel ‘Planetfall’ she now turns detective in a book I didn’t expect, which is a ‘Planetfall’ sequel. Emma Newman is one of our most consistently intriguing, original and compelling storytellers.
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