Wow. Emotionally intense and just devastatingly well drawn character work. Really excellent writing, impressively maintaining the science and wider arc

Emma Newman Planetfall: I looked at this series for the 2020 Hugo (Best Series) awards but didn't enjoy it. It is not an example of good honest SF and the Corey, Thompson, McDonal and Arden SF series were all much better. As it was for the awards it was not appropriate to provide a review.

This book is so slow burn I almost forgot there was heat at all. Yet the last few chapters were much more quickpaced and thus saved the book for me. While it was cleverly written, with endearing main character and intricate combination of semi(?) dystopic world building and closed room mystery, being inside the MC head for too long was exhausting. Yet, again, clearly there is something with Emma Newman's writing that is so, so attractive and made me somehow already starting the last book in the Planetfall series.

Thank you for providing this book as part of the 2020 Hugo Awards Voter’s Packet (finalist for Best Series).

Copy of book received as part of this year's Hugo packet, therefore will not be reviewing at this time.

I obtained this novel to vote in the 2020 Hugo Awards for best series.

This is third book in the Planetfall series. So far, Before Mars is the best book in the series.

Anna's discussion of the pressure to have a child was sublime. It's a good thing that this is science fiction since it's not realistic - right?

without a grounding in the other plantefall books, readers will be rudderless. with a grounding in the planetfall series, this is an entirely adequate continuation

Before Mars is once again a very different novel to both of its predecessors and I can't help but admire the way the author has written such a variety of different styles and twisted the genre slightly on every novel. I didn't enjoy it quite as much as After Atlas, but that isn't such a gripe when you consider that After Atlas was an easy five star read. It's worth noting that each of these novels could be read as a stand-alone, but there are narrative threads and characters that tie over to each one making it more rewarding to read them in sequence.

When Anna leaves her home and her family behind to take up a contract on Mars, she isn't quite sure what she's expecting. She definitely isn't expecting to find a note written from herself telling her not to trust the psychologist on the Mars base though. And from there she finds more and more things that are just subtly wrong, leading her to question her very sanity as she struggles to build relationships on this strange planet.

As with all of these novels, Newman doesn't shy away from difficult topics and mental health still plays a huge part in this. I love the way the narrative is very much built around the characters; in some ways it makes for a slow burn novel, but it also allows you to really get inside the head of the protagonist. What I wasn't expecting was the focus on motherhood and the realistic of post-partum depression, but as with all of the other issues Newman has explored I suspect this comes from personal experience. It's raw and honest and made me think of pregnancy and parenthood in a different way. I was also impressed by the exploration of the various relationships, particularly those off base. It's difficult to write relationships that are separated by miles, let alone relationships that are separated by planets.

Having read the previous book, I had a fairly strong idea of how this one was going to end and it still managed to throw a few twists and loops into the equation. The finale is unexpectedly heart-shattering, even knowing what I did in advance. I admit, I had guessed how the mystery was going to resolve itself fairly early on, but I hadn't anticipated a few of the spanners thrown into the works.

What Newman does expertly is build a strong and almost visible future world, making the unknown into the expected. All the technology and social constructs she has been building throughout these three novels are beautifully interwoven, supported by strong and capable characters that are still very flawed and breakable. This is one of the strongest science fiction series that I have read in a long time, in honesty.

"Before Mars" by Emma Newman is the third book in the Planetfall series. In this book we follow the challenges, fears, self-doubt, and waking nightmares experienced by the troubled protagonist, artist, and geologist Dr. Anna Kubrin. Although this is the debut novel for all of the primary characters, there are enough threads between this book and the other two books that it does belong in the series. This novel reminded me of such thought provoking movies as Inception, Total Recall, and to some extent Brazil. The author paints a picture of a Cartesian horror house of being unable to trust one's memories, senses, and thoughts. Unlike Descartes' philosophical escape through belief in God, we need to wait for the end of the novel to be certain of reality. Like Descartes belief in a benevolent God, we were fortunate to have a benevolent author that wrapped things up nicely in the epilogue. If the thrill of wondering what is real is your thing, then this book is your roller coaster!

Thank you for the chance to review the full series in advance of the Hugos! It's a stellar series and one of my favorites to date.

Before Mars is the third novel in Emma Newman's Planetfall series, which was nominated for this year's Hugo Award for Best Series. I've had kind of mixed feelings about the series, which has featured a dystopian scifi universe and a couple of main characters dealing with deep mental trauma stemming in part from tragedies in their pasts, which come to light over the course of their plots. On one hand, both main characters in the first two books have been very strong, and have carried fascinating scifi plots - the first the tale of a colony on an alien planet with a secret past, the second a noir mystery in a dystopian Earth run by corporates and featuring powerful cults - so as to make the books incredibly readable. On the other hand, both books kind of ended on serious downer notes and left me very ambivalent about the point of it all, especially the second book After Atlas.

Before Mars is unfortunately more of the latter and very little of the former - to the point where I'm not sure why it exists at all, except maybe if the characters involved are to pop up later in the series. Taking place at around the same time as book 2 in the series, After Atlas, it shifts the setting to Mars and its main character to a new woman who has her own mental trauma from a tragic past and a life that she just can't seem to live the way others expect. But while the book's prose remains very readable, allowing for me to read through it rather quickly, the plot revolves around mysteries and questions about the main character's possible madness that are way too predictable in the end....and feel very redundant after similar mysteries showed up in the last book - with the 2nd book's ending forming a climatic event here. As such, it almost feels like this could have been written as an alternate 2nd novel in the series, but with the actual 2nd novel existing separately, it's hard to tell what purpose this book serves.

Note: Each novel in the series features plot points related to the others, but has not - three books in - relied upon the reader having any foreknowledge of the prior ones. That's still the case here, so this book can be read as a stand alone if you want, skipping the other two novels.

--------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------------

Geologist Anna Kubrin has finally arrived on Mars after months of travel. The small installation there, owned by multi-gazillionaire Stefan Gabor, is home to only four other occupants - 2 scientists, a doctor and a psychiatrist - and is most known these days for the produced television show by one of the scientists which Anna was a big fan of back on Earth. Anna isn't sure what to expect from Mars, having managed to get there in a non-standard way: her hobby of painting caught the eye of Gabor himself and she's supposed to create such art on Mars so as to earn a lot of money for Gabor, even if she'd rather study the planet's rocks then commit entirely to painting.



Moreover, Anna has spent the last few years feeling like she wasn't living the life everyone else expected from her - with a loving child and husband who she just can't feel the right emotions towards, and a tragic past that has left her unmoored from the rest of her family. She has spent the trip to Mars in full 3d immersion in her videotaped memories, and feels sometimes like she can't tell the difference between immersion and reality....but if she told anyone that, she'd be considered crazy. So she tries to keep these feelings inside.....

But when she gets to Mars, and finally disembarks, she finds some things that make her question her sanity: a note, painted in her own hand, warning her not to trust the psychiatrist; and a ring, packed in her belongings, that is clearly a forgery of her own wedding ring. Moreover, the note is clearly written on a missing fourth sketch pad that she remembers packing....even though the manifest says she only packed three pads. And as Anna begins to explore the installation, she finds Mars feels somehow familiar to her as if she's been there before....and she begins to see things that the installation AI insists are not actually there.

Is Anna actually going mad? Or is there something else going on in the Mars Installation, something that someone would do anything to prevent Anna from learning?

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New protagonist Anna Kubrin is very similar to our prior series protagonist (Ren and Carlos) in a number of ways. Like the two of them, she's haunted by a tragic moment in her past - in her case, when her father seemingly tried to kill her mother, having gone mad. Also like the two of them, she has a mindset that doesn't quite fit that of what is expected of her - in her case, the expectation that she be a happy mother to a young child, with a loving husband she is supposed to care for, to go along with a work and hobby that should provide much more joy. But Anna finds herself unable to care quite in the way that she's supposed to - she doesn't dislike her child, but she just doesn't feel the motherly joy she's seemingly supposed to at all of the firsts that come from her baby. Moreover, she finds herself disassociated from what is going on around her, as if it's not really happening - a problem when comparing her experiences to that of immersed memories, which she frequently spends her time immersed in.

It's a character that works - Newman is at this point clearly really damn good at building up main characters with different mental states from the norm and making them sympathetic, to say nothing of showing how others' responses to their mental states only makes things worse for those characters. It's not too dissimilar a detail to what she did with the first book's protagonist, Ren, only the idea of mothers who don't experience motherhood the same way as others is the character type this time around, and it's a certainly real phenomena in our current world that isn't really understood by most people.

Unfortunately, that's about the only part of this book that works, and it can't quite carry everything. Newman's prose is still somehow very readable in a way I can't explain, so I got through this book very quickly. But all the mysteries the plot tries to conjure up are either utterly laughable or fail to provide satisfying answers - mainly because the answers are the exact same as the ones we had in book 2. Readers of that book are aware of what happens to the Earth around the time period of this novel, and will be awaiting it happening here....so when it does happen in a way to cause confusion, the reader is entirely aware of what's going on and isn't intrigued. The mystery of how Anna could have painted a warning to herself is obviously one of a few possible things - memory loss, actually being in immersion the whole time, or time travel, and really only one of these things is plausible in this universe. And the rest of the mysteries, of what's really going on in Mars, all lead to the exact same answers as were found in the last book, which isn't too surprising since the person behind Anna's trip to Mars and the planet itself is the same rich billionaire (Gabor) as was a major antagonist in that book.

If you had skipped from book 1 to this book in this series, you would probably enjoy this book a lot more - the mysteries would suddenly be intriguing and their answers possibly surprising, with the climactic event being a mystery to the reader until the reveal. And Anna's own mental trauma is probably more similar to the first book's protagonist (Ren) than the second book's (Carlos), although her tragic backstory is sort of related to Carlos' and another aspect of Carlos' tragic backstory recurs with another character here - but again, that only makes it feel stale here, whereas it'd feel fresh if you hadn't read the second book. It thus makes me really wonder if this was originally intended to be the follow up to Planetfall, because it probably would work as such, in an alternate way as After Atlas wound up doing.

But After Atlas WAS the follow up the Planetfall, and since it exists, and most readers of this book will have come from that novel, this book is only going to provide an absolutely frustrating experience for most readers. It did for me at least, so unless these characters recur in future books - and so far none have - then I just don't get why Before Mars even exists...a book should never feel like an outtake from an alternate draft, and this just really does.

This is a book I am accessing via Netgalley for the Hugo nomination packet. Due to this, I will not be reviewing this book via Netgalley at this time.

A well crafted story set on mars, a bit slow to start and get into since the story is more character driven depending on emotional developments and not outright physical action. Once the reader understands they are not going to get action set pieces, but rather a slow build story based on emotional developments and a slow unraveling of the mystery the reader will be able to set back and enjoy the revelations as they come along. There is some room for a sequel if the author decides to write one.

I got this as part of the Hugo Awards Voting Packet. I love this series! I look forward to reading the author’s next book.

This was fantastic, buuuut. I absolutely loved the idea of "psychological thriller on Mars", and it's very well executed. Generally speaking I loved the book, but up until the end I was scared it would go to a disappointing ending. It didn't (actually, far from it), but I was scared of that. Now I'm not sure whether the issue is with my lack of trust or with the fact that what I was seeing as a possibility was not clearly eliminated as a possibility, but that made my reading slightly more uncomfortable because I was "I like this thing A LOT, but I'm afraid it's going to go to a conclusion I don't like and that it will make the whole thing significantly worse".
It didn't, and I'm happy with that; it's also not a feeling I'm much used to, which kind of bothers me. In the end - it was actually a fantastic book! Looking forward to the fourth one :)

Thank you so much for providing this book as part of the Hugo voting packet. When I have read this book my review will be posted to my blog, Goodreads and retail websites.

This is a tantalizing standalone mystery set on the Red Planet, with a complex, relatable main character and good science backing up the worldbuilding. This series was on my 2020 Hugo Best Series ballot, and this novel is my favorite of the four novels which have been published in it thus far.

The mystery gradually unfolds as the story builds up well to the final revelations and the main character's investigation of troubling inconsistencies and strange events reveals a devastating truth.

It's not necessary to read the first two books before reading this one. (There are a few passing references to events in the other books, and a bit of a spoiler for one of them.) I did really enjoy both of the preceding books, though, and I do recommend reading them at some point if not done before this novel.

If you are in the mood for a very good sci-fi and like weird but fun books, then this is the perfect series for you.

While I haven't read the other books by this author, this novel did just fine as a standalone. It hit a lot of tropes I enjoy reading about: Corporations taking over for government, AI, and the tenuous grasp on what is real, what is manipulated, and what is outright false. The characters are so isolated that the whole setting feels like a trap, at times. Anna's feelings over her marriage and her feelings is another layer of her character but I couldn't really connect to it -- at times it felt repetitive, Overall, I liked it, less for the Sciende Fiction elements and more for the puzzle of solving the mystery.

Somehow, author Emma Newman has not been on my reading radar at all. That needs to change. Looking her up on Goodreads I see that I have read a book by her previously, but had not been impressed. But a lot can happen in six years ... my reading tastes can change, an author's work might grow, a different editor might have a real impact. For whatever reason, this Emma Newman book was definitely a more memorable (in a positive way) experience.

The story: Anna Kubrin has arrived on Mars. She's a geologist, hired by the billionaire running the Mars compound to do some studies of the area. She is also an artist, painting in oils during her free time. But Anna is met with frowns by those currently living on Mars. The need for a geologist is done, they assure her, and they are convinced she is really only there to do paintings for the billionaire's personal collection. But because she'll be using precious resources while there, the others do not welcome her.

Anna is good at fending for herself but when she is out getting photos and making sketches for some of her paintings, she discovers a man-made structure in an area that should be free of human interference. When she tries to report this, she is shut down, and the compound's Artificial Intelligence seems to cover up what Anna thinks she has seen. When she wants to go out again, Anna is informed by the AI that there is a severe dust storm that makes going outside a danger. But when the dust storm lasts unnaturally long, Anna suspects that there are forces at work trying to prevent her from making another trip to the outside. The truth will rock not just her world, but that of everyone on Mars.

This was just a wonderful, fast but engaging read. I was pulled into the story immediately with Anna's enthusiasm for arriving on Mars and her wide-eyed innocence at what she'd find there. We are introduced to the other characters as Anna meets them, and thy all stand out, unique characters easy to identify, even though our perceptions of them will change through the course of the book.

The plot rolls out nicely, though I do think that the 'surprise' can be seen a fair ways off and the moment I read that the AI warned of dust storms my reaction was immediate, whereas our characters were much slower in suspecting something was amiss.

The book does leave the ending quite open for a follow-up book, but what really surprises me is that this is actually the third book in Newman's Planetfall series. There were only a few moments when something was mentioned to have happened, but I never suspected that this was a section of a longer series.

I enjoyed this a lot and really look forward to reading the earlier books as well as whatever comes next.

Looking for a good book? <em>Before Mars</em> by Emma Newman is a fast-paced adventure and a good deal of fun to read.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.