Tags
5 stars, Book Review, colonization, Emma Newman, mystery, sci fi, series, space travel, virtual reality
About Atlas Alone by Emma Newman
Hugo Award winner Emma Newman returns to the captivating Planetfall universe with a novel about vengeance, and a woman deciding if she can become a murderer to save the future of humanity.
Six months after she left Earth, Dee is struggling to manage her rage toward the people who ordered the nuclear strike that destroyed the world. She’s trying to find those responsible, and to understand why the ship is keeping everyone divided into small groups, but she’s not getting very far alone.
A dedicated gamer, she throws herself into mersives to escape and is approached by a designer who asks her to play test his new game. It isn’t like any game she’s played before. Then a character she kills in the climax of the game turns out to bear a striking resemblance to a man who dies suddenly in the real world at exactly the same time. A man she discovers was one of those responsible for the death of millions on Earth.
Disturbed, but thinking it must be a coincidence, Dee pulls back from gaming and continues the hunt for information. But when she finds out the true plans for the future colony, she realizes that to save what is left of humanity, she may have to do something that risks losing her own.
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Review of Atlas Alone
I started out not liking this book. In fact, I wasn’t crazy about it for most of the duration of my reading of it. Two reasons:
1) The main character, Dee, spends a lot of time in virtual reality, or what it is called in this setting: immersives. Immersive games, educational immersives, or personal memories. I have never been all that interested in video games, and now, virtual reality, so having to read through so much of it in the book did not endear me to the story.
2) I did not like Dee. She is not a very empathetic character, therefore, I could not empathize with here. She had many challenges to get through, and I kept hoping that those challenges would be life-changing.
I won’t tell you everything that happened to Dee. Except that she did experience life-changing events. In the end, it was well worth my time reading Atlas Alone. What a great and perfect ending!
The ending suggests that there could be more and there are many possibilities of future adventures. Frankly, if there are no more, I am happy with Atlas Alone being the finale.
Atlas Alone is a novel in the Planetfall series. I have read 2 of the 4 novels so I can tell you that though they are loosely connected by a shared culture and society, they do stand alone. So don’t be afraid to pick this one up if you have not read the rest of the series.
Through Netgalley, the publisher provided a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.
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