Planetfall seems to be polarizing when it comes to sci-fi reader expectations. But I was completely hooked, and then completely obsessed with thinking about its rich themes and painfully real character study. This is, so far, one of my favourite reads of 2021, and I hope other readers like me – who love sci-fi but don’t often find character-centric sci-fi stories – give it a chance.

Imagine that one of the several billionaires currently racing to explore space is about to leave Earth for the last time to begin interplanetary colonization. That’s the premise. The Atlas crew of Planetfall was hand-picked to include the smartest, techiest people to populate their earthlike-planet space utopia. The colony is filled with the coolest sustainable architecture: doors that operate like heart valves, moss that covers floors, furniture that grows into plantlike forms, and which never needs cleaning because it absorbs nutrients from dirt and dust. The colony’s inhabitants are able to 3D print anything they might desire on demand, using materials sourced at the colony and computer models stored in their database.

The story is told from the point of view of Renata, who goes by “Ren,” a 3D visengineer responsible for maintaining all the colony’s 3D printers. Ren was a close friend and romantic partner of a genius visionary Suh who led the original expedition to this distant planet as its spiritual leader 40 years ago. In a Promtheus-like origin plot, Suh, after earthly exposure to a plant whose pheromones made her hallucinate visions, began to claim that some divine entity was calling humanity to a distant planet to make contact with the itself (hey, it’s also the plot of Contact! Emma Newman has seen your sci-fi faves). When the book begins, Suh has been gone – dwelling in God’s City, ostensibly – for 40 years – though it’s heavily foreshadowed that this is something Ren doesn’t believe herself. Ren has become the right-hand woman to the colony’s leader Mack, a marketing expert who has long manipulated the colony into organizing themselves around a religion based on Suh’s supposedly continued existence. According to Mack, Suh is in God’s City, where she releases yearly communiques in the form of sprouted seeds. It will be revealed that Mack does whatever it takes to maintain the core beliefs Suh instilled in the community, no matter how unethical, because they effectively cohere the colony and provide convenient excuses for his frequently Machiavellan manipulations.

When the story begins, Ren and Mack are freaking out about a new arrival at their community gates: a 20-something man named Sung-Soo, Suh’s grandson. Suh’s son Hak-Kun and other colony members crash-landed on the planet 40 years ago, while everyone else landed safely. They had had been presumed dead by most colony members. Except for Ren and Mack, who’d known they survived but have kept that secret for 40 years. The reasons they didn’t go after their lost shipmates, and Ren’s role in this crime, forms the colony’s dark secret.

The colony, thanks to integrated bio-tech which allows everyone to be digitally connected with everyone else, possesses a suffocating social dynamic. This novel is less about the details of the embedded tech itself, more about how difficult it would be to live in that kind of interconnected social environment for an introverted, anxious person. Everybody constantly knows each other’s business, because everyone can be pinged and sent messages constantly, with messages intrusively flashing in front of people’s eyes. Ren struggles to cope with this level of digital embededness. Relatably, she’s always typing her responses with a virtual keyboard because voice-chat feels too intrusive for her. She never lets people into her house, and she’s set up a series of proximity warnings that ping her whenever anybody’s coming close. To convey her experience, the novel’s written in this claustrophobic, tortuous first person, fully immersing us in Ren’s neuroses and careful prickliness around even the people with whom she’s closest. Initially, I didn’t even clock Ren’s obviously OCD behaviours as mental illness: this seemed like a pretty relatable attempt to get some space and maintain some dignity in an environment hostile to privacy. But Sung-Soo’s arrival is the moment of change which will cause Ren’s entire life to unravel, revealing that her compulsions are the products of mental illness, but are exacerbated by secrets impossible to bear.

CW for some scatological references below the spoiler tags.

[Ren is clever, hardworking, great at her job, and burdened with secrets. Because she very obviously has stuff she’d rather keep private, the colony’s leader Mack guilt-trips her into going along with his scheme to dupe the other colony members into believing Suh is still communicating with them from God’s city. He never outright threatens to blackmail her; it’s sufficient to remind her that the truth about Suh is a secret they share. And I think it’s kind of important to the book that she’s been raised as a woman, and this is another aspect of her character leveraged against her to make her keep other people’s secrets? Being people-pleasing, asked to make personal sacrifices for the sake of others, not demanding things of them in return, is very much encouraged when you’re a woman. All these things go into entangling Ren in this mess; being a woman never feels accidental to her character. Additionally, Ren is flawed in a way heroines aren’t usually allowed to be. She’s a total pushover, she’s incredibly insecure, she has absolutely no desire to recover from her OCD behaviours because they protect her from the group who would otherwise be all up in her business micro- managing her illness. She also enables the absolute worst behaviour in others, to the extent of criminal activity, because she doesn’t want to cause a fuss by revealing the truth. If you said she was a corrupt, weak person, I couldn’t disagree. But I found seeing the world through her eyes incredibly moving and quite relatable.

Eventually it emerges that Ren is coping with the stress of her present situation, and her deeply-buried (in a very literal sense) secrets, by hoarding. Because Ren manages the colony’s 3D printers, she’s also responsible for monitoring the supply of materials that fuels them. Stuff thrown away by the colony members is placed into a “masher” which breaks down objects into their components so they can be re-used for printing. When we meet Ren, she’s sifting through the things in the masher looking for items she wants to keep. What she saves isn’t all that remarkable: she keeps a flawed vase with a mobius strip design for no other reason than “I need something to remind me there are still people creating for the love of it.” (26) This is something she does in response to a stressful memory. She’s recalling the time, back on Earth, when her mother chastised her for printing a bodily organ for her ill father who needs an organ replacement. Her mother asks, “where is the beauty? Where is God in all of this?” and Renata answers that God is “everywhere, especially here.” And for her, God – or something sacred, worth saving – is very much in these ordinary material objects she prints, a mentality that has led her to a nonfunctional state of unrestrained object hoarding, which has in turn led her to near-total social isolation despite the community’s closeness.

Ren’s life has been fraught by a very frustrating ephemerality. None of the traumatic things that’ve happened to her are public knowledge, nor have they left publicly visible marks. Back on earth, her young daughter died of a genetic disorder. This experience has left traces on Ren’s body, as a lover notices, but Ren doesn’t talk about her daughter to anyone. Ren left earth forever taking with her only what would fit into the volume of a tiny storage locker allowed on the spaceship: small keepsakes like her daughter’s ashes and a painting of her mother’s. This indifference to the history of objects is another of the colony’s founding deceits, duplicating the central lie about Suh being in God’s City instead of dead. The colony members believe their prophet is still somehow communicating with her disciples; they also believe objects can be infinitely made and re-made without fundamentally impacting human understanding of the world in relation to themselves.

And it seems as though the one lie is intimately connected to the other. Ren doesn’t believe Suh is still communicating to them from God’s City, because Ren herself is planting her yearly communiques within its walls (quite literally, in fact; the missives supposedly from Suh are in the form of sprouted seeds, from the original plant which inspired their interplanetary journey). Likewise, Ren can’t believe that a printed object is a collection of molecules indifferent to personal histories or cultural meanings. Even though she’s trained to fabricate digital objects, even though she’s responsible for managing the supply of components to make them, even though she’s printed thousands of things for the colony. Often she invents meanings for found objects on the spot, and it seems like she does this to compensate for the indifference of the people who would throw them away callously. Of her hoarded household items, overwhelming her with their volume, she can’t bring herself to throw away any of them, no matter how insignificant: “There are holy relics in there, the last connections to my daughter, the book my father wrote, my mother’s art. Too much to carry.” (268)

One clever thing the narration does is produce this void around descriptions of her home. In early scenes, Ren describes the colony leader Mack’s house in detail, along with her lover’s home, when she visits those places. But we never get a description of where she lives, even when new arrival Sung-Soo is prying into what her home looks like so he can get inspired to design his own place. It’s as though Ren goes home and disappears into this void of nothingness, which is really a void of…everythingness, a suffocating volume of accumulated stuff.

The things she hoards provide her with infinite distractions and a physical barrier to dealing with her past. For example, Ren has rescued a half-knitted doll from the masher that is obviously a useless item but in which she has invested personal meaning. She doesn’t know how to knit to fix it, but she resolves to learn how. After a traumatic experience in which Sung-Soo has discovered her hoarding and has tried to bully her into giving up a single item of her collection, Ren is so overwhelmed that she downloads a knitting tutorial and distracts herself for hours by teaching herself to finish the doll. Afterwards, she feels relieved and accomplished because she’s solved this one small problem. She doesn’t care that she hasn’t solved any aspect of her hoarding: she really doesn’t want to solve it. Because firstly, it would mean confronting her own crimes, having cleared the barriers between that secret and herself. Secondly, because throwing things away wouldn’t give her the high of having restored a meaningful object to a state of wholeness. By hoarding, she could theoretically solve the same type of problem infinite times, producing repetitions of this state of distracted and temporary bliss. As a person who will face rejection if her community finds out the truth about her, this is the best she can hope for: distractions until the inevitable revelation of the truth about her, a set of obstacles placed between herself and her dark secret, to stretch out the time until catastrophe touches her to the greatest possible duration.

This Dark Secret, by producing a horror-story environment created by hoarding, conjures up haunted house associations. Even though the bright, sustainable bio-architecture of Ren’s neighbour’s houses, with their valvelike doors and growing carpets, presents an optimistic vision of a sustainable bio-engineered home, Ren’s house is truly like dwelling inside something living with an uncanny sentience all its own. Her hoarding produces a series of narrow passageways she has to crawl and hunch to navigate, rather like the intestinal organization of God’s City. Ren’s house smells bad, pelts her with falling objects, and its meaning is only evident to her: she can scan the piles of stuff she’s accumulated and recognize that that this stained outfit was what she wore on an important date one time, and so it can’t be thrown out.

We know, from flashbacks to Ren’s past, that as a young person on Earth, Ren was experimenting with a model of something like God’s City. While it’s implied within the text that God’s City was something the settlers found, she is, in some paradoxical way, also its architect. God’s city is made of living material that is responsive to stimuli and functions like a living thing. Ren remarks that while God’s City is not an animal in the traditional sense, it looks “almost alive.” Like Ren’s house, God’s City speaks to her, through bioluminescent ripples, by shoving her along its corridors with digestive-like spasms and reversals. In the novel’s climactic scene, it taps into her consciousness in some mysterious way to push her towards a certain pathway in which an ultimate meaning will be revealed – or so it seems from within her perception.

If this organ which constitutes God’s City resembles anything we know, it is like a stomach. The author is not shy about her gut-centric descriptive language: its walls are like “intestines,” it contains structures like a “digestive tract,” it holds cilia and mucus. Digestion is notable for effectively consuming things, and, in a metaphor that can’t be accidental, also for producing shit. Those are the two possibilities of entering the digestive tract: either you are absorbed by the organism to become some sort of dematerialized fuel for its life-force, or you’re shat out into the wilderness – exactly what Ren experiences when she visits God’s City on earlier occasions, wearing protective clothing that separates herself from its juices. As an aside, I just love that a story about a very clever woman plagued by irrational compulsions thanks to mental illness, in her moment of stress-induced breakdown, has the ‘gut instinct’ to flee right into a literal gut. I’m making it sound punny and silly, but it’s not; it’s absolutely riveting.

And now for that twist ending. After Ren is outed as a hoarder, her colony members go through her belongings, sorting things into piles of things that formerly belonged to them and thoroughly calling out her theft from the colony, her violation of all its principles. It’s utterly horrifying, the most intrusive and painful thing she could possibly imagine. And then her Secret is discovered: at the furthest recess of her home, buried beneath 40 years of hoarded garbage, lies Suh’s body, coated in resin to protect her from decomposition, preserved in a monstrance as though she’s a saint. Ren has been hiding Suh’s death in God’s City for forty years; her lie of omission is the deepest, longest-running betrayal of its members. There’s no going back now for Ren: no possibility of reconciliation with her colony when she’s revealed their entire religious order to be a sham.

So she escapes to God’s City without her usual protective gear, sacrificing her physical body to potential absorption by its digestion. Colony life has chewed her up and spat her out, and now she finds out if she’s palatable to another organism: one without teeth. During her journey into the bowels of the earth, Ren senses God’s City in communication with her – through bioluminescent light sources that direct her path. In an earlier instance in which Ren visited God’s City, Ren found the hinge of a pair of eyeglasses stuck in its walls. This simple object was a thing she found so mysterious (in an age of vision correction far past basic Lasik) that Ren had to search the colony’s databases for similar objects to gain a clue of what it was. Which is a fascinating plot point – in an age without physical museums, cultural memory for everyday things like a pair of eyeglasses becomes so easily lost, an anxiety that runs right through Ren’s hoarding behaviour, which is intimately connected to memories and a sense of clutching at memory in the absence of the lost loved one.

And what Ren finds in God’s City during the book’s final scene is proof that this one eyeglass fragment is not the only object to be deposited there. It holds other objects carefully assembled, a curated collection of other culture’s everyday things. In this gallerylike chamber, Ren deposits the last meaningful object she’s managed to save – that mended, knitted doll – on an empty place that seems prepared for it, before finally taking the sacrificial place of God himself on an altar-like stone formation and dying.

I can’t say that I found this ending entirely satisfying upon my initial reading – it was such a departure from my expectations. However, I do think it is done entirely intentionally. We always expect a character lost in their own solipsism to be wrested back to reality, to see an arc of healing and acceptance of reality, but here it’s just the opposite. Ren dies believing she’s fulfilled her spiritual destiny as charted by divinity itself. But after thinking about this a lot, a reader’s potential interpretation of the conclusion is, at the very least, double-edged.

What might be actually happening is Ren’s total breakdown, in which extremely stressful circumstances produced a psychotic break from reality altogether, a confusion between inner experience and outer reality manifested in the metaphor of the stomach. She has been self-absorbed; preoccupied with understanding God’s City. Now what has absorbed her attention will…absorb her literally, to produce a transcendental experience she interprets as profoundly meaningful. It is tragic that a talented woman who contributed so much to the colony would die alone, in disgrace, after a mental health crisis. So, with that in mind, giving us the visionary, religious experience within her own head seems like a kinder ending that compensates for the cruelties Ren’s already experienced while hinting at darker truths beyond her myopias.

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This book is thrilling, absorbing, painfully real and wildly imaginative. I could not put it down and I could not stop thinking about it. If you like unreliable first-person narrators, deeply flawed queer female main characters, uncanny sustainable bio-engineered architectural fantasies, or books that explore science and religion, you just might love this as much as I do.

Originally published on Goodreads on Aug 15, 2021