I read Joanna Russ’s We Who Are About To… when I was in my early twenties. It’s the story of a bunch of unrelated people who crash land on an uninhabited but habitable planet, and whose male members quickly decide that what they really all ought to do, since no hope of rescue is forthcoming, is colonize the planet and start breeding for the cause.
This is a dumb thing to consider, but it’s an assumption we see in a lot of Golden Age SF parables about how the last man and woman alive should hook up so humanity can carry on. Russ skewers this idea neatly by lobbing a homicidal no-nonsense heroine into the fray.
A lot of these starry-eyed tales forgot that when we’re going off to colonize new planets, who we are as humans comes with us. Russ’s book did not. Nor does Emma Newman’s blistering SF/mystery/colonization novel PLANETFALL. It took me a few pages to get into this one, enough that I considered setting it down for about half a minute before the mystery kicked in and I realized there was more to this seemingly utopic colony than first meets the eye.
When it comes to pinpointing what it is I love about a particular book, or why I get passionate about it, sometimes I can’t come up with much more than “I just liked it.” Other times I write something like 4,000 words of personal essay on it. So the mileage really varies. PLANETFALL was the perfect merging of two genres I love – mystery and science fiction – with fascinating worldbuilding and community politics. We forget, in getting wrapped up in our huge epic fantasies, that the original seat of political backstabbing happened within small, insular communities just like the one in PLANETFALL. It’s little towns that often harbor the biggest secrets.
It’s what those secrets do to us, and their consequences to our larger communities, that make up the creepy heart of this fun, engaging science fiction novel.
Five stars of win. Highly recommended. Best of all, it’s out today, so you can click and buy right now.
