Planetfall - Emma Newman

Planetfall - Emma Newman - 336 pages

This book has everything: a messiah complex, a murder mystery, space hoarding, a womb city, and so many 3D printers it will blow your mind.  What really inspired me to plow through this one was the humility and realism of the main character's visceral struggle with mental illness superimposed over the origin story of a colonial society born of what could be termed a different species of the same animal.  Renata, our touchstone and narrator through the book, is buried twenty-two years into life on a colony built on the foundation of the holy vision of her best friend, now believed by the colonists to be communing with God in an alien city.  There are so many secrets swirling inside Ren about how they arrived and survived that it's slowly tearing her apart.

Something about this book feels genuine and naked and sharp when it comes to how Ren lives with the weight of her history at the foot of the God city.  She's brilliant, driven, empathetic, but broken, and her humanity hangs out everywhere as she and the mystery of the colony and a new visitor, the grandson of Ren's prophetic BFF, unravel.  I can't say the end of this book came a total surprise; maybe it was the path of least creative resistance to wind up where it wound up, but by the time I got there I didn't care.  The rest of the ride was such a glorious gut punch that the journey more than made up for it.

The Shepherd's Crown - Terry Pratchett

The Shepherd's Crown - Terry Pratchett - 288 pages

Well, here we are at the end.  There's a lot to say about this book, and not a lot; it's the last Discworld novel, it's the last adventure, it's a compass that shows bits and pieces of where the stories of Discworld would have headed if Pratchett had more time to tell us.

The upshot of the story itself is that Tiffany inherits a legacy and consequently, a problem with the elves (a problem not so dissimilar to the one that started her adventures in witching).  But I think the bigger story here is the story of the book itself: while the plot holds together, it's clear in this book more than the others that Pratchett ran out of time to finish it.  What he wrote about seemed to weigh heavily on him both within the context of the novel and the context of his personal struggle (the story of Esme's last day, and the aftermath, for example) and it was written through the filter of an illness that dulled some of Pratchett's stylistic sparkle on the page.  At the end of the book is a brief explanation: some portions of the story were written a few years prior to publication, but some were left to the end and didn't have the luxury of Pratchett's usual comb through to bring the details into focus.  It shows.  It shows in the less lively attitudes of the Feegles, and the sink of Gytha Ogg into cronehood.  It shows in the brevity of what's shared, and in the tone and delivery of a story that had more to say than what was said.  It shows in the nods to all the major players on the Disc, all the little loose ends tied up.  Pratchett knew this would be his last published novel, and this was the goodbye he could give us.

How much of that impression was colored by my own sadness at reading the last novel by a writer whose books were milestone reading throughout my formative years?  He wrapped it up so nicely for us, writing a story of passing and legacy and hope for more adventures in the future, that I'm not sure it really matters.  He left us with the impression that life, whether here or on the Disc, will carry on, and we're better for having shared the adventure.