Friday Firsts is a new meme that runs every Friday over on Tenacious Reader. The idea is to feature the first few sentences/paragraphs of your current book and try and outline your first impressions as a result. This is a quick and easy way to share a snippet of information about your current read and to perhaps tempt others.   This Friday I’m reading :  Planetfall by Emma Newman

Every time I come down here I think about my mother.  I don’t want to: it just happens.  My brain has decided it’s a critical subroutine that must be executed when the correct variables are in place: (which time = predawn) + (when physical location = beneath the colony) + (when physical act = opening the door to the Masher) run “unpleasant memory of mother #345.”

My hand is pushing the door open and I’m back at my old lab and she’s following me in, her heels clicking on the tiled floor.  I’ve prepped the equipment to run one hour before her arrival so there’s something to show straightaway.  She never was a patient woman.

“Is that a printer?” she asked, and I nodded.  It started then – I know it now that I’m looking back – that tightening of my gut as I dared to hope I might impress her. 

“Yeah.” I smiled.

She didn’t.  “Like the one I have at home?”

“Better.”

“What’s it printing?”

“My latest work.”

She went up to the plasglass and peered through, seeing nothing but a few millimeters of tissue.  She turned to me with her nose slightly wrinkled. “What is is printing?”

“A new pancreas,” I said.  “For Dad.”

“Oh.”  She’d hoped I was making something she could hang up in the hallway of her inert home.  “I didn’t realise you were involved in this sort of thing.  I’ve seen it on the new.”

And that was the moment I knew I’d been stupid to hope for anything.

My First Impressions

Well, there’s not really much given away here is there?  It’s a memory, although clearly of a future that is more advanced than ours – if you can print out a pancreas – or is that already possible??!?!  I think my immediate fear was on reading the little algebraic type problem in brackets I wondered if this was going to maybe be a little bit more problematic than I hoped (in terms of going over my rather simple head).  However, it’s not working out like that so far so we’ll see and I must confess that on typing out this quote and rereading it for accuracy I completely understand what it means but in the immediate furore of starting a new book and rushing through the first few pages it did fly over my head.  Silly, I realise.  Anyway, so far so good.

What you reading this Friday??  What are your first impressions??

*The above excerpt was taken from an advanced reader copy and it is possible that the final version may have further changes.