After Atlas

"Emma Newman, like myself, writes both fantasy and science fiction. She does both extremely well. This four-book series started with Planetfall , which deals with the ship Atlas, going to a weird alien planet and discovering a very weird alien thing, which answers no questions. It’s just there . The humans can’t work out what the point of it is, and there’s nothing else. So that book deals with the colony, which has gone to this place, and found the thing they were promised – and then it’s gone nowhere. And then we have After Atlas , which is back on Earth, after Atlas has left. Atlas has taken the best and the brightest, and an enormous slice of global resources. It’s similar to having an enormous plague or a war or something like that: there has been this colossal hit to the world. You have a malevolent-corporation, dark-future situation, and everyone is on the breadline. If you’re not useful, you don’t get any food. The main character is a sort of corporate investigator. He’s gone through a weird childhood where he’s been forcibly psychologically modified to make him a better investigator, which gives him all manner of psychological issues, as you can imagine. The story follows him getting involved in a case which leads to a colossal global thing that’s going on… which I’m not in any way going to spoil. This book was nominated for the Clarke awards . I’d have loved it to win, honestly, it was definitely my favourite of the set at the time. Close to the end, there is one of the most phenomenal gut punches of emotional twist that I have ever come across in any book. There aren’t that many books I’ve read that have a moment where you have to put the book down and process what has just happened before you can carry on with the narrative. And this is absolutely one of them. The other thing Emma does in this book, and in most of the books in this series, is look at mental disability in a science fiction setting. The characters are wrestling with problems in a way that you very seldom see in science fiction. Sci fi and fantasy both have a problematic history with depicting disability of any kind. It’s better now than it was by some considerable margin; but just as there were great difficulties with sci fi depicting gender and depicting race, disability is another one where it’s just invisible in a lot of places. You just don’t get disabled characters, or you have that very awkward thing of a future where theoretically, technology can erase disability, and that in itself is problematic. There is an enormous, very complicated dialogue to be had about that which I don’t propose getting into now. But in this series of books, mental disability is looked at in a very sympathetic, detailed and convincing way. So again, there are two reasons to read this book, and in fact this whole series. It’s going into that social territory where a lot of sci fi doesn’t go. And it’s an amazing, phenomenal and really quite traumatic story. The series as a whole is very good, but this one is my favourite. You don’t have to have read Planetfall to read this one, it works very well on its own; but you get that extra background context of what the Atlas was, and why it was such a tragic waste sending all of that stuff off into space – because they found very little when they got there."