Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

Please note that this book is not for me - I have read the book, However I had to DNF and because i do not like to give negative reviews I will not review this book fully - there is no specific reason for not liking this book. I found it a struggle to read and did not enjoy trying to force myself to read this book.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused and thank you for the opportunity to read this book

The planetfall series is one of my all time favourite, almost impossible for me to rank Planetfall, After Atlas and Before Mars, but unfortunately Atlas Alone isn't a new favourite.
I liked the premise and loved the ending but as a whole I'm left a bit disappointed (though I really really want a book 5 so I preordered a copy for my collection)

For the representation, the main character doesn't use the word "asexual" but it's made clear in her words that she is, and basically all the problematic tropes linked to this representation are presents. Even if the representation had been done in a better way, this didn't felt as good, the scope was smaller and I didn't have a feel of the spaceship like I did in other books or even in Before Mars where the station really had a presence.
Still looking forward to where this series will go next!

I love Emma Newman and I love books which deal with virtual reality/dangers of technology, so it's no wonder that I loved this one. Tightly plotted, the perfect balance of mystery and menace. Plus that ending! I can't wait for her next novel in this series.

Atlas Alone is a dark and kinda twisted story with a sting in the tail and an endlessly debatable ending.

Dee is an independent person with a lot of trauma from her past life. She is used to surviving on her own and struggles to connect or open up to people. She is one of the few witnesses of the life-changing event at the end of After Atlas and she feels helpless and lost. She is stuck on a ship with people she doesn’t know and power structures that she doesn’t understand and is finding it very difficult to cope with.

When a mysterious person invades her VR space and offers her the opportunity to take revenge she finds herself forced to face up to the trauma of her past at the same time as her morals and her personality are being tested.

I’m loving Emma Newman’s Planetfall series. I like how each book is its own story, with connections to the others but its own characters and its own story to tell. Atlas Alone follows straight on from the ending of After Atlas but because it’s about a different character it feels like its own, separate story. The setting is still rich in AI and lovely tech details but this one goes much more into the online immersive gaming and social world. It gives this book much more of a cyberpunk feel than the other books in the series.

I had fun trying to guess the identity of Dee’s helper. I did guess it in the end but honestly not that much sooner than Dee did herself and it was an enjoyable bit of mystery mixed in with the sci-fi. I always love a good mystery!

The story is full of suspense and excitement and has a lot of depth to it. There are a lot of parallels in the book with modern slavery, the issues around workers rights and the fears about AI and the way technology is going. Dee finds herself questioning her morals and how far she will go for revenge and to stop the new world society from mistreating their workers. I feel like this would be a good one for a book club discussion! It gets very dark along the way and there are a lot of moral questions.

I loved and hated the ending at the same time. Loved because it worked so well and like I mentioned it raised a lot of moral issues. Hated because I generally like a good happy ending with issues resolved and this was the exact opposite. I got very frustrated with Dee and some of the choices she made, but it all fit the story so I can’t complain too much. You don’t always need a main character that you admire to enjoy or appreciate the story.

Another good entry in the Planetfall series, I’m hoping that the story continues!

This is a spoiler-free review for Atlas Alone, but will contain huge spoilers for After Atlas..

I absolutely love Emma Newman’s Planetfall books, so there’s no surprise that I was eagerly awaiting, and ultimately ended up loving, this book. The first sequel in the Planetfall series, Atlas Alone picks up six months after the events of After Atlas and deals with the consequences of those events in deep, thought-provoking, and totally horrifying way that only Emma Newman can achieve.

Atlas Alone is all about the question of sacrificing a few to save millions. I love the morality of this issue in fiction, and I think Newman has really nailed the difficulty of the decision and the resulting repercussions. What makes this particular story work so well is the groundwork she has laid out for us in previous books. Everything she has written in Planetfall, After Atlas, and Before Mars has led to our deep understanding of Dee’s decision making and the reason she makes the choices she does -- from the hothousing and contract slavery, the crushing power of the GovCorps, the restricted freedoms of the average citizen, and the integration of AI and neural chips all come together to give us a full picture of Dee’s world and her resulting actions..

One of my favouite elements of Atlas Alone is the way that mersives and gaming is integrated into the story. Dee is, as we know, a gamer and mersives were always going to play a major role in her story. However I was so impressed by the way Newman used them as a tool to not only tell us the story of Dee’s past, but also to explore recent history and the rise of the GovCorps, something I’ve been interested in learning more about since Planetfall. The reader doesn’t get stuck in a single environment -- in this case, the Altas 2 -- and the mersives give a chance for more world building and exploration.

Newman is the author to go to for interesting, complex, and unique female characters and Dee is no exception. Her characterization is a perfect balance of strength and vulnerability and I just feel like I got her. Her decisions and actions are not always one I agree with, but I totally understand where she's coming from and never had a moment of questioning or doubting where she was coming from. I especially loved exploring her backstory via mersives and gaming, all the while gaining more and more insight into who she is at her core.Dee, like all of Newman's female characters, is a fully fleshed-out, complex, and unusual character and I loved reading her story.

Atlas Alone is probably my favourite book in the series so far, which says a lot because I absolutely love all of these books. For me, Newman is at the top of her game and is easily one of the best science fiction authors writing today.

This felt more like an episode of The Outer Limits than a novel. The world within the novel felt incredibly small, with only around half a dozen people with dialogue in the whole novel. The way the generation ship was set up also felt convenient rather than realistic. Similarly, the plot, which is played out almost entirely in the style of an immersive VR style videogame, felt implausible. The historical-future game setting of London was atmospheric, well-drawn, with intriguing details, but the rest of the novel, and then main character just didn't work for me. Also, it's one of those novels where the reader is so far ahead of the MC for the whole novel, which didn't gel with the MC's supposed hypervigilant nature.

Atlas Alone is part of the Planetfall universe, but is a standalone novel. I have read Planetfall, but not After Atlas or Before Mars.

Me cuesta mucho ser imparcial con una reseña de Emma Newman y su saga de libros ‘Planetfall’. Los tres primeros libros de la serie me parecen de lo más destacable de los últimos años en la ciencia ficción. No solo porque estén escritos maravillosamente bien y que te lleven de página en página sin apenas darte cuenta, sino también por la amplitud de temáticas que aborda.
Desde la primera entrega, ‘Planetfall’, Newman nos ha llevado a un futuro apenas lejano donde, sin embargo, la humanidad ya se ha asentado en un planeta como Marte. Como pudimos ver en “After Atlas”, los acontecimientos en la Tierra llevan al ser humano a condenarse para la eternidad. ‘Before Mars’, por otro lado, mezcla la complicada vida diaria en el planeta rojo con la añoranza por una vida anterior en nuestro actual planeta. Como nexo común entre todas estas historias se suceden reflexiones sobre como la religión, el sistema económico o las decisiones políticas han afectado el devenir del ser humano, y cómo las enfermedades mentales y la estabilidad afectan al individuo más de lo que a día de hoy podremos prever.
‘Atlas Alone’ continua la senda de rememorar como era la vida anterior a que los habitantes de la Tierra terminaran por acabar los unos con los otros. En esta cuarta entrega de la serie de novelas teóricamente independientes, Newman utiliza nuevamente personajes ya conocidos pero en momentos temporales distintos. Es recomendable (no imprescindible, aunque te va a desvelar mucho de lo que sucede) la lectura de ‘After Atlas’ para un completo entendimiento de algunos de los actos que se relatan y que llevaron a nuestra protagonista a la situación que se describe.
Dee Whittaker es una mujer de 43 años que ya conocíamos de aquella entrega. Se encuentra en una nave en un viaje de 20 años junto a otras diez mil personas. Hace apenas seis meses consiguieron escapar de la Tierra poco antes de que la guerra nuclear que asoló el planeta comenzara. Ese hecho atormenta a Dee, quien intenta encontrar quien de los actuales habitantes de la nave dio la última orden para comenzar la guerra antes de dejar atrás el planeta. Sin embargo, la estructura de la nave dificulta mucho su investigación: se encuentran divididos en pequeños bloques y apenas puede relacionarse con aquellos que comparten bloque. Solo la tecnología permitirá llevar a cabo una investigación de incierto final.
Toda la tecnología de la nave nos resulta conocida para aquellos que hayamos leído alguna de las novelas de la saga. La particularidad de ‘Atlas Alone’ está en la incursión de Dee en mundos de realidad virtual, donde los habitantes de la nave compiten entre sí con el objetivo de aliviar un viaje tan largo. Estos juegos, aparentemente inofensivos y sin consecuencias en la vida real, son el hilo principal de la trama cuando algunas de las acciones de Dee tienen un impacto directo en la realidad de aquellos con quien comparte viaje.
Gran parte de la novela, casi la mitad, transcurre en estos mundos de realidad virtual. Esto da lugar a que Newman dedique buena parte de esta trama a reflexionar sobre como los seres humanos actuamos distinto según estemos en realidad virtual o no, y como nuestras acciones varían significativamente según sepamos si tiene consecuencias o si alguien nos puede reconocer fuera del mundo creado artificialmente. La parte negativa de estos viajes es el propio transcurrir de la aventura en esos mundos, en los que la protagonista apenas encuentra problemas para sortear cualquier impedimento. Lo que vendría siendo un videojuego en formato aventura gráfica sencillo y sin demasiado reto para el jugador.
La búsqueda de los causantes del cataclismo en la Tierra por parte de Dee centra gran parte del argumento de la novela. Sin embargo, Newman vuelve a dar importancia a la faceta humana, poniéndose en la situación de una persona que tiene que abandonar repentinamente el planeta donde ha crecido. Los recuerdos, la añoranza por sus seres queridos y los recuerdos del pasado dan la profundidad al personaje al que estamos acostumbrados con los libros de esta autora.
Más allá de estos elementos reconocibles en la obra de Emma Newman que aquí vuelven a hacer acto de aparición, ’Atlas Alone’ me parece la novela menos potente y profunda de la saga hasta el momento. Lo que viniendo de dónde venimos es algo que en cualquier momento tenía que pasar. Recordemos que los tres libros anteriores son súper recomendables. Dee es un personaje interesante, que ahonda nuevamente en los temas que Newman más le gusta tratar y lleno de sentimientos, mientras que la nave resulta un lugar con un potencial casi ilimitado para futuras historias. El desarrollo de la novela, sin embargo, no tiene ni la complejidad ni el factor sorpresa de las entregas anteriores. Habrá que estar pendientes de futuras historias.

This is one of those atmospheric, twitchy narratives where the main character in first person viewpoint is driven by a sense of wrongness after witnessing a terrible crime. Seeing such horror has taken its toll on her and her two closest friends – Travis and Carl. What now drives her is a desire to discover who was responsible, because she knows they are on the ship.

What Newman excels at is writing difficult characters who don’t immediately appeal. I am aware that if I encountered Dee in real life, I would be repelled by her formidable reserve and the social mask she hides behind. That said, it’s made very clear exactly why she is as she is – to her fury. Because while immersed in a game, she finds herself confronted with aspects of her terrible past – and a scarily powerful entity she calls ‘the beast’ is intent on getting her to come to terms with what happened to her. While Dee is equally determined that she’ll do no such thing – over the years as an indentured employee (more like a slave) she has managed to throw up mental defences which she is reluctant to drop. Particularly when feeling so threatened…

And with good reason. When a sudden death in a game is mirrored in real life and Carl’s remarkable investigative skills are let loose on the case, Dee realises she is at risk of being arrested for murder with only the beast’s assurance that she won’t be caught. I found Dee a compelling protagonist, who I loved. So that ending… well – I can’t say much about it – but I didn’t see THAT one coming!

Yet another amazing climactic cliffhanger that leaves me desperate for the next slice in this amazing adventure. This is one of my favourite series at present and Atlas Alone is every bit as good as I’d hoped it would be. Very highly recommended for fans of well-written, character-driven science fiction. The ebook arc copy of Atlas Alone was provided by the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest opinion of the book.
10/10

I received the ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a review.

I am not quite sure what to say about this novel! I have been enthralled by this series since I read the first volume, and the fourth novel continues to complicate the world and the story - one not only of individuals but humanity in this dystopian near future. This story is satisfactory, fascinating and complex. I cannot wait for its next chapter. The themes of freedom and enslavement, capitalism and religious fundamentalism, working on one's trauma and wanting justice are explored and at the same time, this novel is a well-paced sf thriller with a central mystery and plot twists. I know what novel I most want to compare it to, but to name it would serve as a spoiler - thinking about it in the beginning it certainly primed me to guess the central mystery ahead of its reveal.

At the same time, this novel has some issues with its choice(s) of/for central character. While I found the plot twists interesting and mostly earned, the voice was a little off, and the representation is not necessarily for me to dissect, but falls into some problematic tropes. All I can say is that the ending makes me want to read the next book sooner rather than later and I will be looking forward to it.

I really enjoyed this addition to the series. I love Newman's writing. It's a mixture of mystery, sci-fi with excellent characterisation. She doesn't leave things on the surface, and you feel immersed deep into the story and characters. I love the darkness and mysterious nature of these books.
If you like sci-fi, I'd definitely recommend.

Thanks a lot to the publisher and NetGalley for this free copy in exchange for an honest review.

Atlas Alone by Emma Newman is the latest standalone novel set in the Planetfall universe. In some ways it makes most sense as an almost-direct sequel to After Atlas, but it certainly stands alone just fine. There is a new protagonist, who did appear in After Atlas but whom I have very little memory of from that book. In fact, After Atlas is the book I remember least of the series (not entirely sure why) and despite that I had no problems getting into Atlas Alone. It does contain a pretty major spoiler for events that happen at the end of After Atlas and near the end of Before Mars, however, so beware on that front. That massive spoiler is also in the blurb below.

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.

This was an excellent book and different again from the earlier books in the series. The new protagonist, Dee, did show up in After Atlas and the events of that book are why she is now on an American-built starship following the Pathfinder on a twenty-year journey to another planet. What does one do to kill time on a space ship? Play lots of full-immersion games and try to get an idea of who else is on the ship. Then get an invite to a leet gaming server, get suspicious of the people on board and strike up a conversation with a game designer who does not respect personal boundaries.

At first I was surprised at how much of this story took place in immersive games, especially when I also realised how far I had gotten in terms of pages read. But then the true story became clear and turned out to not be quite what I had expected. (Trying not to spoil here.) Although I very much guessed something that wasn't revealed to the main character for some time, the story took a lot of unexpected turns, right up to the dramatic and powerful ending (which only caused me to loose a little sleep, thanks to the timing of when I got up to it). Overall, Atlas Alone was a remarkable book in what has been a remarkable series.

As I said in my preamble, Atlas Alone does follow most directly from After Atlas, and the other books in the series aren't required reading. But they are all excellent and I don't think reading them in publication order is a bad thing either. Also, I think After Atlas is the most depressing book (for all that I don't remember it too clearly) while I found the others more enjoyable reading. Don't get me wrong, this isn't exactly a "fun" series. It deals with some heavy issues, most notably death and mental illness. I laughed aloud a few times reading Atlas Alone, but that was more at sarcasm or outrageous developments than actual humour. None of which stops me from loving this series.

To reiterate, this continues to be an excellent series and I hope it gets some more recognition, preferably in the form of a Hugo nomination for Best Series (hint to Worldcon members who are eligible to nominate). I look forward to more Planetfall novels in the future. They have all had very different but deeply psychological takes on their protagonists and I would love to read more.

5 / 5 stars

First published: April 2019, Gollancz
Series: Planetfall, book 4 of 4 so far but sort of a direct sequel to After Atlas
Format read: eARC
Source: Publisher via NetGalley

I really love the Planetfall series,every one is a pure joy to read and although it is a series they are loosely and randomly connected so you can pick up any one at any point.

Atlas Alone is a dark, enthralling addition to the list, a tightly claustrophobic mix of mystery, science fiction and character driven drama, once more beautifully imagined and perfectly executed by Emma Newman whose prose is a sheer delight.

Dee is a complex and engaging character, drawn into a terrifyingly real and emotional virtual reality game – a mysterious stranger encouraging her to track and destroy those responsible for the worst act imaginable.

Heading into an unknown future in a controlled and secretive ship, Dee searches for truth, tries to keep her friends safe, behind a practical facade that hides hidden depths. Fascinating and utterly gripping, After Atlas takes you on an intriguing journey through the human psyche, ending with a surprisingly thought provoking finale.

I loved every minute of it. I still have one Planetfall novel to go, not sure how I missed it but am suddenly pleased I did. These are the books I love because they are different, vibrant and give you a different perspective on just about everything.

Emma Newman is a huge talent indeed.

Highly Recommended.

Esperaba con mucha ilusión el final de la tetralogía de ciencia ficción de Emma Newman con obras tan destacadas como Before Mars, Planetfall o mi preferida After Atlas.
Al principio de la lectura cuando vi que volvían a aparecer Carl y Travis, dos personajes tan importantes en After Atlas mis expectativas aumentaron, pero fue tan solo un espejismo. Siguiendo la lógica interna de la serie, que va concediendo el protagonismo a distintos personajes y situaciones, Carl y Travis solo son personajes muy secundarios en Atlas Alone. Prácticamente todo el peso de la narración recae sobre Dee en el periplo de Atlas, la nave espacial que ha dejado atrás la Tierra en busca de un nuevo planeta en el que asentarse.
El juego de la autora para conseguir que cada libro sea de lectura independiente cronológicamente se viene abajo en este último volumen, porque parte de la importancia de la trama destripa el final de After Atlas. Era una apuesta muy interesante, pero casi imposible de seguir manteniendo conforme iba aumentando el número de volúmenes de la serie.
Sin embargo, el principal problema con el que me he encontrado en esta novela ha sido la previsibilidad. Los giros de guion que deberían sorprendernos no lo consiguen en absoluto. No me molesta que la mayor parte de la novela se narre desde la inmersión en una realidad virtual u otra, ya que es el futuro al que parecemos estar abocados, pero los detalles escabrosos de estos juegos inmersivos me parecen superfluos y más que añadir carga psicológica al libro se la restan.
Los cuatro libros que conforman esta laxa tetralogía tratan la perspectiva psicológica de los personajes de una forma respetuosa y concienzuda y Atlas Alone no es una excepción. Uno de los pilares fundamentales en torno a los que gira la novela es cómo afrontar la pérdida y seguir adelante, aunque el tratamiento del duelo quizá sea menos acertado que en las otras entregas.
La crítica a los extremismos religiosos es extremadamente dura, rozando el esperpento, porque el hecho de que los “malos” sean tan recalcitrantemente malvados entra en conflicto con las que se supone son sus propias creencias. Pero, viendo lo que los extremismos han conseguido a lo largo de la historia de la Humanidad, lo mismo la autora se queda hasta corta.
La prosa de Emma es tan melodiosa como nos tiene acostumbrados, así que no deja de ser una lástima que esta última entrega de la serie no alcance el nivel de las anteriores.

This review contains some spoilers for earlier books in Newman's Planetfall sequence. Especially, if you haven't read After Atlas or Before Mars, stop NOW and read those two books next, then come back.

Atlas Alone is the fourth book in Newman's sequence, and the first that is a direct sequel (to After Atlas). The four share a timeline and take place in the same universe, characterised by an Earth gone to the bad, and a neural chip technology allowing users to link their minds, receive and manipulate data in virtual spaces, experience immersive video games, and record their interior lives.

In Planetfall,we saw a human colony on a remote world, to which people had travelled (aboard a ship called Atlas) on a voyage masterminded by the mysterious "Pathfinder', Lee Suh-Mi, a women who had visions of either a God or of aliens, which gave her the technology to make the voyage possible. After Atlas, an SF-crime mash up written from the point of view of indentured detective Carl, explored the consequences for Earth of this mission having left, and also introduced Dee, the principal character in Atlas Alone, and Travis. Before Mars was set on a Mars base at around the same time as After Atlas.

At the end of After Atlas, Carl, Dee and Travis escape Earth on a second Atlas. As they leave, they discover that the planet has been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust - something kept from most of Atlas 2's passengers. There can be no return. There will no further Atlases, or any help from home. Atlas 2 is alone.

As Atlas Alone opens, Dee is coming to terms (or rather, not coming to terms) with the consequences of this. She believes that those guilty of Earth's destruction are aboard the ship, and wants to hunt them down and punish them. But the organisation of the ship is mysterious. It's not really clear who is in charge, why the three are aboard, or what is planned for the future. Each of them has a small cabin, minimal possessions - and a twenty year journey ahead.

Like the other Planetfall books, this story is very much seen from the perspective of a single character - here Dee - and is as much about portraying that character's history, psychology and motivation as it is about external plot. Again, Newman succeeds magnificently in this. Dee is a complex, damaged individual ('Making proper friends is something other people do'). She experienced many traumas as a young woman in the 2030s when the world she knew was consumed by riots and political crisis, leading to the fall of democracy and the rise of the 'gov-corps'. This trauma isn't explained in detail: we see some of it through the games/ simulations - "mersives" - that she takes part in and see is recalled.

In particular there's the experience of "hot-housing" - Dee and Carl both fell into the hands of slavers whose business was to condition and sculpt young minds to perform superlatively at some task and them to sell them on to corporate buyers. This dark experience is recalled a number of times. It has given Dee certain skills, but robbed her of the ability to trust, made her terrified of admitting any vulnerability and damaged her in other ways too, which only slowly become clear. ('They trained me to hide what I thought and felt, and the whole time they thought they were removing those feelings altogether').

This interior portrait of a frightened, emotionally choked yet highly capable woman is chilling and at the same time deeply sad. It makes this book absolutely riveting, if often grim reading (Newman did similar things with Carl in After Atlas, and also in Planetfall) and, I'd say, sets a new standard for a convincing and psychologically vulnerable character. Because of course, despite what Dee must make herself believe to keep going ("My face is a mask in front of a mask") she IS vulnerable...

The book is also notable for the rage it conveys at privilege and injustice: while Atlas 2 does offer escape from a literal Hell on Earth, it isn't some idealistic colony ship travelling to establish a new Eden (unless you believe a new Eden would be a white dominated, slave society). But what to do about that? Dee may have found someone who is willing to help, but she has, to put it mildly, trust issues, knowing, absolutely KNOWING, that everyone will eventually let her down - but also, accepting that as fact and working with it ('Do I really want to play in a mersive created by someone who clearly has dodgy opinions about boundaries? Of course I do').

I wasn't surprised at all that I really enjoyed this book. As ever, the writing is sharp with telling observations on society ('I hold my hands still at my sides, school my face into showing what all men like this want to see: agreement admiration') and the Planetfall universe is engaging and credible. Giving everyone neural chips may be a fairly conventional SF idea, but the way Newman gets us inside the heads of damaged characters with recognisable psychologies means she pulls off a kind of literary equivalent of the neural chip idea. And there's a big, deliberately unresolved idea at the centre of this book that left me reeling. Issues of trust, boundaries and control dominate, leading to questions about when it is justifiable to try and 'fix' someone if they refuse to accept the 'fix'. For the duration of the book you are Dee, you feel what she feels, suffer as she suffers and as her certainties begin to crumble, so do yours, until finally, well... you'll have to read the book to find out.

Simply outstanding. You have to read this.

Trigger warnings : mention of genocide, murders, death of a parent, re-living childhood trauma, religious cult

I’m a huge fan of Emma Newman as a writer and of the Planetfall series especially. After Atlas is probably among my top 5 favorite books of all time and I was expecting Atlas Alone a lot. I’m now super happy because it’s a GREAT addition to the series.

This story is told from the POV of Dee, Carlos’ best friend, from After Atlas. I loved getting to see more of how Carlos was doing, and Travis as well. We only gets glimpses of it but it really makes me wonder if we will get more of them in the future (I hope so).
Back to Dee : I think I can honestly say that among all the books that I have enjoyed over the years, Dee is probably the one POV character I have disliked the most. She is really unlikable, in my opinion, and I never adjusted to her way of thinking, I was irritated by her at the beginning, I was really annoyed by the midway point but by the end… Yeah, I hated her.
I get why she is like this, though I do think we would have needed a little bit more of show and not tell : Dee keeps thinking that everyone has always turned their back on her and left her to fend for herself… But none of the stories we get from her childhood show us that. I guess we can say her parents left her but there’s circumstances here, they didn’t do it on purpose at all? And the only other story we get from her childhood seem, as far as we know, like people tried to actually help her. I needed at least one story showing me how that statement (that Dee tells herself over and over) was true. Because, as it stands, I see Carl’s back story and hers and… He got it so much worse than her ? I know it’s not the childhood-trauma Olympics, but still. Somehow, he is not as cold hearted and closed off as she is. But I guess everyone deals differently. But maybe it was shown to us that way on purpose by Newman, to make us realize things about Dee’s way of thinking since childhood, I’m not sure.

Still, this story is, as always with this series, very centered around trauma and mental illness. With Dee, we have someone who obviously repress a lot of what has happened to her and has huge thrust issues, bordering on paranoia I think. It was a super interesting take, yet again. And even though those problems were reasons why I disliked her so much, it also did make sense and it was always consistent with her character.
Also, Dee seems to be asexual or even aromantic. I love representation of myself but I wouldn’t give that book as actual rep though. Seeing everything else about Dee’s personality it’s really not good rep and Maybe not rep at all. Afterall, the words are not used and it might only be part of something else about her. I’m not sure.

This story is a lot about the mersives and games in general I thought it was really cool, though I’m not sure everyone will. I do play a lot of FPS (first person shooter) and action games on console but it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. There’s a lot of gaming in this story and especially a lot of worldbuilding and explanations around the games. It was maybe a bit long at times… Do we really need to know all those things about how this or that game works? I love games and still I was sometimes a bit bored. The same thing happened when we got into long explanation on data analysis (Dee’s job). It was a bit tedious at times.
Somehow, not all the words are actually explained : not everyone knows what an NPC is (non playable character) and I think those letter are used without explanation. Same with some terms that you might have seen from movies analysis like “MacGuffin” that I don’t think is such general knowledge.

The mystery was, as always with Newman, super gripping. And if one of the reveals seemed obvious to me I was still glad that “trope” was used because I love it so much. But the rest of the mystery really got me on the edge of my seat during the last pages, as always. And the whole concept really made me think. What was the good thing to do in this situation? Is there even one good solution to the problem Dee was confronted with? Basically and without spoilers because you get this from the official synopsis : when you know you are in a ship with a bunch of people who actively decided to kill billions… Should you kill them? Or put them to trial ? But there’s no justice established in space. Who has the power to judge them and how to do it? Should it be revealed to everyone and risk some sort of riot that will just get even more people killed? (Not all of those options are talked about in the book, but I ask them all the same).
I talked to my partner about this book right after finishing it and we got into a long debate on what is the good thing to do in this situation… We came up with nothing in the end. And that’s the beauty of it, and Emma Newman gave us a book that will make me think for a long time because everyone’s action by the end of the book can be questioned on its morality and rightness.

Gripping and thought provoking, Atlas Alone is a great addition in the series even though it hasn’t become my favorite. And it really makes me hope that there will be at least a 5th book because we need a conclusion, we need to know what will happen with everyone meets up.

I have read the previous books and enjoyed them and looked forward to reading this, unfortunately I am probably not the target audience, I love books that challenge my thinking and science fiction does that a lot but the techno gamer narrative fails to either interest or engage me, as alway its well written but not for me