Odd discoveries and contradictory memories lead her to doubt her own memories and distrust the personnel already at the base.Īnna is a fabulously deep character who, just as with the main protagonist Ren in ‘Planetfall’, has a traumatic background and layers of conflicting feelings and habits that become more and more intense as the book progresses. This leaves her disoriented, imagining she is still in a mersiv, prone to intense daydreams and confused memories, lending the book a Phildickian air, though less psychedelic. During her six month solo voyage, Anna has spent much of the time in immersive simulations or mersivs, leaving her with the symptoms of immersion psychosis when she arrives. The corporation that owns the rights to Mars is more interested in media and art than science and so the focus shifts away from what you might expect from a Mars novel and concentrates instead on commercialisation and industrial espionage. She is a geologist and painter, sent both to carry out scientific work and also to paint unique Martian landscapes. Just as in the first book, the setting and plot are intriguing but once again Emma Newman’s strength is her astonishingly complex characterisation of realistically flawed people.Īnna Kubrin is the latest addition to a small Martian expedition. In the third of her ‘Planetfall’ books, Emma Newman returns to a loosely-related setting in ‘Before Mars’, a book with the same background but this time set on Mars several years after the departure of the colonists who feature in ‘Planetfall’.
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