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"Hugo Award winner Emma Newman returns to the captivating Planetfall universe with a novel about vengeance and the lengths to which one will go to save the future of humanity. Six months after she left, Dee is struggling to manage her rage toward the people who ordered the nuclear strike that destroyed Earth. She's trying to find those responsible, but she's not getting very far alone. A dedicated gamer, Dee is endeavoring to discover a mersive good enough to enable her to escape her trauma. When she is approached by a designer who asks her to play test his new game, she hopes it will be what she needs--but it isn't like any mersive she's played before. When a man suddenly dies in the real world, she realizes that at the same time in the game, she killed a character who bears a striking resemblance to the dead man--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 continues the hunt for information. But when she finds out the plans for the future colony, she realizes that to save what is left of humanity, she might have to do something that risks what remains of her own"--… (more)
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Newman's ability to keep the final two or three chapters' worth of story almost entirely obfuscated throughout the reading experience to get there keeps impressing me, novel by novel. Having consumed unknown thousands of stories in my life, I'm used to at this point having a fairly decent sense, subconsciously or consciously, as to what any given story is headed towards -- even with the ones I love. Newman dances around this intuitive expectation rather brilliantly, with snappy, almost shockingly quick finales in each of these 'Planetfall' novels, that usually focuses on some seemingly tertiary aspect of the story I wasn't quite realising would turn out to be its focus. And yet, it always works.
That's not to say some twists aren't telegraphed and can be predicted (I saw one of the main ones in this book coming a mile away, for instance), but the _direction_ of the story, more than the actual reveals, is always something satisfyingly other than what I'd have first thought. "Atlas Alone" is very much following in this tradition, with perhaps the most chillingly unexpected final twist yet, in my eyes. (And, endearingly, both darker and less dark than what I _was_ sort of expecting, at the same time,)
With this novel, what has only been hinted at in the previous installments becomes rather clear: All of the (fairly standalone) novels in this series are pointing towards some kind of explosive mutual convergence. I'd be very excited to read that, should Newman ever get to write it. Because based on these four, she definitely knows what she's doing.