After Atlas (SF) - Emma Newman *****

If, like me, you read Emma Newman's first Planetfall novel and expected After Atlas to be a direct sequel, it is initially a little off-putting to discover that it involves a whole new set of characters - but after a little bedding in, this proves to be an advantage as the plotting in After Atlas is much tighter than the first novel and it works brilliantly both as science fiction and as a murder mystery.

The setting is Earth, decades after the departure of the Atlas spaceship that carried the colonists who featured in Planetfall, with a central character who is related to one of the Planetfall characters. For me, the Earth setting worked significantly better than the Planetfall one and the whole thing slotted together better, actually making the first novel seem better than it did on its own, as now we got a lot more of the context of the people involved.

The only small negatives here were weaker versions of the problems of the first novel. The central character seemed irritatingly self-centred and self-destructive, turning against his only friend without any thought for what she was going through. And once again, Newman seems to have felt it was a good idea to hold back a piece of information from us which the central character knew (in this case, which of the Planetfall characters was his mother), a technique that is irritating rather than suspense-building.

These are small issues though it a truly engrossing novel with a series of linked mysteries to unravel and a shocking ending. The corporate future, set alongside both the best and the worst of the implications of IT developments, is grimly realised and the whole thing pulls the reader along at a cracking pace. This is without doubt one of the best SF books I've read this year. I had expected to wait a little after reading this before starting the next in the series, Before Mars, but after After Atlas I had to plunge straight in.

Paperback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

The Autobiography – Charles Darwin ****

I have to confess to putting off reading this book until the last moment, as I expected it to be a typical piece of Victorian sentimental unreadable stodge. I was wrong. Darwin’s little book (only 150 small pages with appendices) was originally written for his own children, and displays a very personal style of writing – though, as son Francis comments, his style was always more populist than was common then: “In writing he sometimes showed the same strong tendency to strong expressions that he did in conversation. Thus in the Origin, p440, there is a description of a larvel [sic] cirripede ‘with six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes and extremely complex antennae’. We used to laugh at him for this sentence, which we compared to an advertisement.” The main book is delightful because it demonstrates Darwin’s self-depreciating modesty, and the fascinating path he took from enthusiastic shooter of game, to amateur geologist (still his...

Govert Schilling - Five Way Interview

Govert Schilling is an acclaimed and prize-winning freelance astronomy writer and broadcaster in the Netherlands. His articles appear in Dutch newspapers and magazines, but he also has written for New Scientist, Science and BBC Sky at Night Magazine, and he is a contributing editor of Sky & Telescope. He wrote dozens of books (including a couple of children’s books) on a wide variety of astronomical topics, many of which have been translated into English, German, Italian, and Chinese, among other languages. In 2007, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) named asteroid 10986 Govert after him, and in 2014, he received the David N. Schramm Award for high-energy astrophysics science journalism from the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society.His latest book is Target Earth . Why science? We live in troubling times. Fake news and conspiracy theories abound, and trust in science is diminishing. Many adults don't seem to realize that almost everythi...

Search This Blog