Planeta by Ana Oncina

I'll admit I don't always understand what makes a book "manga" in the American market. Translated from Japanese - sure, that's obvious. Korean and Chinese comics get more complicated, since those generally read left to right, but getting fussy about "manhwa" or "manhua" smells a bit too much of the lamp.

But if a book is by a Spanish creator, why are the pages organized in an English-language edition to flow right-to-left when each page reads left-to-right (like the Spanish read, like English-language also reads, like most European languages), and why is it called a manga?

At that point, I start to think it's purely a marketing slogan, detached from the actual content of the book. Doesn't mean anything negative, but it has stopped imparting any useful information to the reader other than "the publisher thinks you will like this if you've liked other stuff they did." 

That brings me to Ana Oncina's [1] 2025 "manga" Planeta, a science-fiction story by the creator behind the cozy Empanada & Croquette series and the 2023 teen-lesbian romance Just Friends. It was published in a romance line, Love Love, though I would not characterize it as a romance. On the other hand, it is largely about the relationship between the two main characters, and they do meet and form a relationship over the course of the book.

Well, in one reality, they do...

Planeta takes place in two realities. Valentina is a young woman living in a small cabin in the woods with her dog Soup, near a small town she visits regularly for supplies and human contact. She makes pottery, and sells it both online and at local craft fairs. It's heading into winter. The time is "now," as far as we can tell.

VAL3 is a young woman in a medium-future universe where humans have fled a devastated earth. Everyone lives in couples, each with a small module inside a transparent bubble, on the inhospitable planet Nebulon, or "Planeta." The couples are matched to each other from birth, and grow up together under the care of robots. Their society is like Asimov's Spacers, but even more so: they never meet anyone else outside of VR. VR is their main way of experiencing everything; Oncina doesn't show any of them working but does imply money still exists.

VAL3 is matched with AN3. The two are in love, as they must be. They have been very happy together. We don't know how aging works in this world, or how old they really are, but let's assume they are fairly young, as they look to be.

Valentina is dreaming of being VAL3, and vice versa - or the same mind is switching between the two realities every time she goes to sleep.

And then Valentina sees another young woman in that small town, who looks exactly like AN3. Her name is Anna; she's staying at a B&B in town for an extended time. The two fall in love - as we see in the other reality, they're perfectly matched for each other, right?

VAL3 isn't happy anymore. The life as Valentina, in a living world, is more compelling than her entirely-VR life in the sterile module. Oncina doesn't directly compare the relationships in the two worlds, but I had to wonder if the newness and surprise of Valentina's new relationship with Anna was also a factor, compared to the inevitability and day-to-day-ness of VAL3 and AN3.

VAL3 withdraws, spends all of her time in bed, trying to get back to the other world. She neglects her partner AN3, her friends, everything about her life. She consults with an AI therapist, which doesn't help. She just keeps being told this is her life; it's wonderful and as good as human could ever wish for; she must be grateful and live this life or else.

That escalates; the implied "or else" is the way the book ends.

There's a version of this story where Valentina/VAL3 is inspired by her double life; where she takes ideas from one back to the other; where being with the same woman in two worlds means they're meant for each other and that brings them closer together. This is not that story. This is the story where a cold SF world is inherently off-putting, wrong, inorganic, sterile, stifling - and the reader is supposed to see and sympathize with that, and not with poor neglected AN3.

I found the ending of Planeta strong but a bit unearned, and quite a puzzler for a book published as a romance. It also collapses the essential question of which world is real, when an ending that kept that ambiguous could be more interesting.

But Oncina tells the story she meant to tell well, with crisp art, cleanly differentiating the two worlds through color - but still making them parallel as well. (The book ends with schematics of the cabin and the module - our heroine's homes in both worlds - which emphasizes how similar they are.) I might wish she had made different choices, but it was never my choice.

[1] Translated by Diego Jourdan Pereira, which I didn't find room to fit in anywhere else.