Recommended: Planetfall series
Nov. 8th, 2022 09:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sunnyskywalkerAnother book series recommendation, as spoiler-free as possible. Science fiction, partly near-future dystopian murder mystery and partly alien planet colonization mystery-ish, and notable for its nuanced treatment of mental illness. The books in publication order are Planetfall, After Atlas, Before Mars, and Atlas Alone.
The setup: the Atlas project took a thousand of Earth’s best and brightest off to seek God on an alien planet, leaving behind a time capsule to be opened forty years after its departure. Shortly afterward, a lot of Earth governments collapsed amidst massive riots. Now many areas are controlled by corporations which have taken over government functions, nearly everyone has artificial intelligence implants in their brains, and those implants are useful tools for the gov corps to control the unwillingly-indentured servants they’ve invested in training.
Interestingly, the reading order is flexible. Planetfall-the-book follows the colonists on the alien planet, while After Atlas and Before Mars happen at roughly the same time on Earth and Mars, and there’s no contact between the colony and our solar system. So you could read Planetfall first or last, and could potentially read Before Mars before After Atlas — which would change which book you would read knowing a looming Event was about to change the characters’ lives in drastic ways. Atlas Alone is really the only one you couldn’t read first, because it continues the story of some characters from After Atlas. If anyone reads the books in a different order, let me know what the experience is like!
The books all have mystery elements, especially the latter three. After Atlas is a straight-up mystery with a detective protagonist, while Before Mars kicks off with the main character discovering a warning in her own handwriting which she doesn’t remember writing (oh, and her wedding ring has been replaced by a fake, and there are footprints where no human should ever have walked…). Atlas Alone has a mysterious figure who communicates only via neural implant, a virtual reality game which somehow causes a real death, and ship’s crew who are probably up to no good. But the books are strongly character-driven as well, because you can have it all: plot and character and cool worldbuilding! The characters need to face their traumas, learn to have emotionally intimate connections with other human beings, and survive or improve their circumstances if possible. Not that this is easy or that they necessarily succeed on all counts…
All of the books have characters whose emotional difficulties and mental illnesses strongly affect their lives, handled with much more nuance than I usually see. In Planetfall, something just after they landed deeply shook Renata and prompted her emotional withdrawal from everyone else and another major problem you see damaging the quality of her life — but she’s also struggled with anxiety since childhood, so this trauma interacted with her existing problem. I’ll talk about Carlos in After Atlas more below. In Before Mars, Anna’s difficulty bonding with her baby and coping with the mind-numbing day-to-day tasks of childcare aren’t attributed solely to her pregnancy being unwanted and possibly a ploy by her boyfriend to keep her from leaving him (though that probably doesn’t help). Her father’s delusions, which make her fear she’s developing a similar condition when weird things start happening on Mars, are no less frightening or problematic if induced through his neural implant for corporate conspiracy reasons rather than naturally arising — there’s no, “Oh, good, everything’s fine if we’re not really crazy!” It’s more, “Oh no, that would also be terrifying, and also the consequences of Dad’s delusions were painful regardless of the cause.” And Dee in Atlas Alone has decades of reasons for her tendency to close herself off emotionally and use people to survive, and she’s definitely potentially dangerous — but she’s also being manipulated by a terrifyingly powerful person throughout the book. Someone who says her reactions show her character, while the nature of the manipulation makes us wonder whether she might make different choices if the person manipulating her didn’t have such apparently conflicting goals…
I know endings are a major factor in how people feel about books and whether they even want to read them, so here’s my attempt to characterize them in non-spoilery ways. Planetfall’s ending could be read as either someone leaving behind problems they can’t solve and transcending their painful life or utterly giving up, depending on how cynical you are feeling. After Atlas is mostly hopeful for certain characters but also ends with a huge gut-punch that will emotionally affect them forever and has terrible consequences for a lot of other characters. (That final line, OMG. It will never leave me.) Before Mars likewise — some characters have hope for themselves, but also hear about that Event which is very, very bad for a lot of people, including some people they care about. Atlas Alone ends with some problems being maybe solved (in a bloody fashion) but lots of work ahead, and is also utterly chilling as far as one person’s fate. I mean, there’s a chance of improvement in a sequel, maybe, but it’s a perfect horror ending as it stands.
After Atlas is probably my favorite of the bunch. Carlos Mendoza was a baby when his mother left on Atlas forty years ago. His father, heartbroken at being left behind, fell into a deep depression and was drawn into the Circle, an anti-technology cult founded by Alejandro Casales, who also just missed out on joining the Atlas colonists and dedicated himself to bringing similarly-abandoned people together to farm and make their own clothes by hand on a rural commune. Unfortunately, when Carlos ran away from the cult, he fell into the clutches of “hot-housers,” who forced him through an enhanced training program that left him with a decades-long contract of indenture to pay off. Now he’s a detective for the Noropean GovCorps — outwardly successful, because he’s not allowed to tell anyone about his contract.
His latest case? The brutal murder of Alejandro Casales. The investigation takes Carlos to a very posh, very exclusive hotel where they only serve real food, the décor uses real wood, and even the keys are real metal keys. One of the Circle members traveling with Casales has disappeared. Seems straightforward — except nothing adds up the way it should. Casales seems to have gone against some of his most sacred principles in his last days, despite being the sort of cult leader who sincerely believed the things he told his followers. What happened to the Circle since Carlos left? The guests include a ruthless billionaire who can take pretty much unlimited revenge for the tiniest slight if he wants to, which is terrifying regardless of whether he’s involved or not, because what if you look at him wrong? His frightened trophy husband might be hiding more than a desire to escape for a day or two. And it probably won’t surprise you that someone powerful doesn’t want Carlos to discover the truth, which just might have something to do with the Atlas project…
Besides being a good mystery, After Atlas has so many great layers.
Casales is especially interesting in that he does seem to have genuinely cared about his followers and genuinely meant to help them. In fact, he might have helped some of them more than he harmed them. His group is in that fuzzy gray area between a cult and a group of people banding together to live a countercultural life with guidance from someone with organizational skills and a vision because it makes them happy and helps them heal from deep loss. He’s a troubling character, but you can’t write him off as a straight narcissistic cult leader villain.
The minor characters, from the pathologist to the gray-market food truck guy, are vividly characterized. Most of them are nice people, which makes life hard for Carlos, who is in desperate need of friendly human interaction and emotional intimacy but has contractual as well as psychological reasons why he can’t reach out the way he’d like. (Seriously. His contract used to allow dating, for example, but they updated the terms to forbid it now. How could you even form close friendships knowing that you might be forced to cut the other person off at any moment without even being allowed to explain why?) We even feel like we know Alejandro Casales, despite him being dead from the start.
Another aspect done really well is the way Carlos handles everything he’s been through. He mostly holds it together, focusing on what he can do while dying by a thousand cuts every time he runs up against the metaphorical bars of his cage. He also has an eating disorder, in that he can’t eat synthetic printed food without vomiting and has added a lot of time to his contract to buy food grown in dirt. And there was no simple, single event which caused it. He has terrible memories of a time in his early childhood when the household food printer malfunctioned and his father was too sunk in depression to respond, and the only food for days was gross protein goop. But Carlos still thought of printed food as “real” food and thought the dirt-grown stuff at the Circle commune was weird and wrong at first. He’s still hurt and angry at the whole cult experience, but learning to grow his own food and eat it fresh from the garden is a happy memory. Part of the experience of being hot-housed was that he didn’t get to choose anything, including what he ate. Now choosing to add time to his contract so he can buy dirt-grown food is one of the only freedoms he has. So, it’s complicated, and he knows it’s a psychological reaction from a mash of several different experiences, and that it’s both a healthy self-assertion and self-destructive, but understanding the problem doesn’t fix it.
Tragically, currently there aren’t any publishing offers for a fifth Planetfall book. While the books are mostly self-contained, the series as a whole leaves us hanging with some characters flying through space towards the alien planet while the colonists have just gone through some Stuff which should make the second ship’s arrival even more interesting than it was going to be. I hope that will change!
If this sounds at all like your cup of tea, please borrow the books from your library or buy them if that’s an option and improve the odds of a Book 5 a bit.
The setup: the Atlas project took a thousand of Earth’s best and brightest off to seek God on an alien planet, leaving behind a time capsule to be opened forty years after its departure. Shortly afterward, a lot of Earth governments collapsed amidst massive riots. Now many areas are controlled by corporations which have taken over government functions, nearly everyone has artificial intelligence implants in their brains, and those implants are useful tools for the gov corps to control the unwillingly-indentured servants they’ve invested in training.
Interestingly, the reading order is flexible. Planetfall-the-book follows the colonists on the alien planet, while After Atlas and Before Mars happen at roughly the same time on Earth and Mars, and there’s no contact between the colony and our solar system. So you could read Planetfall first or last, and could potentially read Before Mars before After Atlas — which would change which book you would read knowing a looming Event was about to change the characters’ lives in drastic ways. Atlas Alone is really the only one you couldn’t read first, because it continues the story of some characters from After Atlas. If anyone reads the books in a different order, let me know what the experience is like!
The books all have mystery elements, especially the latter three. After Atlas is a straight-up mystery with a detective protagonist, while Before Mars kicks off with the main character discovering a warning in her own handwriting which she doesn’t remember writing (oh, and her wedding ring has been replaced by a fake, and there are footprints where no human should ever have walked…). Atlas Alone has a mysterious figure who communicates only via neural implant, a virtual reality game which somehow causes a real death, and ship’s crew who are probably up to no good. But the books are strongly character-driven as well, because you can have it all: plot and character and cool worldbuilding! The characters need to face their traumas, learn to have emotionally intimate connections with other human beings, and survive or improve their circumstances if possible. Not that this is easy or that they necessarily succeed on all counts…
All of the books have characters whose emotional difficulties and mental illnesses strongly affect their lives, handled with much more nuance than I usually see. In Planetfall, something just after they landed deeply shook Renata and prompted her emotional withdrawal from everyone else and another major problem you see damaging the quality of her life — but she’s also struggled with anxiety since childhood, so this trauma interacted with her existing problem. I’ll talk about Carlos in After Atlas more below. In Before Mars, Anna’s difficulty bonding with her baby and coping with the mind-numbing day-to-day tasks of childcare aren’t attributed solely to her pregnancy being unwanted and possibly a ploy by her boyfriend to keep her from leaving him (though that probably doesn’t help). Her father’s delusions, which make her fear she’s developing a similar condition when weird things start happening on Mars, are no less frightening or problematic if induced through his neural implant for corporate conspiracy reasons rather than naturally arising — there’s no, “Oh, good, everything’s fine if we’re not really crazy!” It’s more, “Oh no, that would also be terrifying, and also the consequences of Dad’s delusions were painful regardless of the cause.” And Dee in Atlas Alone has decades of reasons for her tendency to close herself off emotionally and use people to survive, and she’s definitely potentially dangerous — but she’s also being manipulated by a terrifyingly powerful person throughout the book. Someone who says her reactions show her character, while the nature of the manipulation makes us wonder whether she might make different choices if the person manipulating her didn’t have such apparently conflicting goals…
I know endings are a major factor in how people feel about books and whether they even want to read them, so here’s my attempt to characterize them in non-spoilery ways. Planetfall’s ending could be read as either someone leaving behind problems they can’t solve and transcending their painful life or utterly giving up, depending on how cynical you are feeling. After Atlas is mostly hopeful for certain characters but also ends with a huge gut-punch that will emotionally affect them forever and has terrible consequences for a lot of other characters. (That final line, OMG. It will never leave me.) Before Mars likewise — some characters have hope for themselves, but also hear about that Event which is very, very bad for a lot of people, including some people they care about. Atlas Alone ends with some problems being maybe solved (in a bloody fashion) but lots of work ahead, and is also utterly chilling as far as one person’s fate. I mean, there’s a chance of improvement in a sequel, maybe, but it’s a perfect horror ending as it stands.
After Atlas is probably my favorite of the bunch. Carlos Mendoza was a baby when his mother left on Atlas forty years ago. His father, heartbroken at being left behind, fell into a deep depression and was drawn into the Circle, an anti-technology cult founded by Alejandro Casales, who also just missed out on joining the Atlas colonists and dedicated himself to bringing similarly-abandoned people together to farm and make their own clothes by hand on a rural commune. Unfortunately, when Carlos ran away from the cult, he fell into the clutches of “hot-housers,” who forced him through an enhanced training program that left him with a decades-long contract of indenture to pay off. Now he’s a detective for the Noropean GovCorps — outwardly successful, because he’s not allowed to tell anyone about his contract.
His latest case? The brutal murder of Alejandro Casales. The investigation takes Carlos to a very posh, very exclusive hotel where they only serve real food, the décor uses real wood, and even the keys are real metal keys. One of the Circle members traveling with Casales has disappeared. Seems straightforward — except nothing adds up the way it should. Casales seems to have gone against some of his most sacred principles in his last days, despite being the sort of cult leader who sincerely believed the things he told his followers. What happened to the Circle since Carlos left? The guests include a ruthless billionaire who can take pretty much unlimited revenge for the tiniest slight if he wants to, which is terrifying regardless of whether he’s involved or not, because what if you look at him wrong? His frightened trophy husband might be hiding more than a desire to escape for a day or two. And it probably won’t surprise you that someone powerful doesn’t want Carlos to discover the truth, which just might have something to do with the Atlas project…
Besides being a good mystery, After Atlas has so many great layers.
Casales is especially interesting in that he does seem to have genuinely cared about his followers and genuinely meant to help them. In fact, he might have helped some of them more than he harmed them. His group is in that fuzzy gray area between a cult and a group of people banding together to live a countercultural life with guidance from someone with organizational skills and a vision because it makes them happy and helps them heal from deep loss. He’s a troubling character, but you can’t write him off as a straight narcissistic cult leader villain.
The minor characters, from the pathologist to the gray-market food truck guy, are vividly characterized. Most of them are nice people, which makes life hard for Carlos, who is in desperate need of friendly human interaction and emotional intimacy but has contractual as well as psychological reasons why he can’t reach out the way he’d like. (Seriously. His contract used to allow dating, for example, but they updated the terms to forbid it now. How could you even form close friendships knowing that you might be forced to cut the other person off at any moment without even being allowed to explain why?) We even feel like we know Alejandro Casales, despite him being dead from the start.
Another aspect done really well is the way Carlos handles everything he’s been through. He mostly holds it together, focusing on what he can do while dying by a thousand cuts every time he runs up against the metaphorical bars of his cage. He also has an eating disorder, in that he can’t eat synthetic printed food without vomiting and has added a lot of time to his contract to buy food grown in dirt. And there was no simple, single event which caused it. He has terrible memories of a time in his early childhood when the household food printer malfunctioned and his father was too sunk in depression to respond, and the only food for days was gross protein goop. But Carlos still thought of printed food as “real” food and thought the dirt-grown stuff at the Circle commune was weird and wrong at first. He’s still hurt and angry at the whole cult experience, but learning to grow his own food and eat it fresh from the garden is a happy memory. Part of the experience of being hot-housed was that he didn’t get to choose anything, including what he ate. Now choosing to add time to his contract so he can buy dirt-grown food is one of the only freedoms he has. So, it’s complicated, and he knows it’s a psychological reaction from a mash of several different experiences, and that it’s both a healthy self-assertion and self-destructive, but understanding the problem doesn’t fix it.
Tragically, currently there aren’t any publishing offers for a fifth Planetfall book. While the books are mostly self-contained, the series as a whole leaves us hanging with some characters flying through space towards the alien planet while the colonists have just gone through some Stuff which should make the second ship’s arrival even more interesting than it was going to be. I hope that will change!
If this sounds at all like your cup of tea, please borrow the books from your library or buy them if that’s an option and improve the odds of a Book 5 a bit.
