terprubin 's review for:

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini

3.0

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Picture, if you will, every single science fiction trope imaginable. Not only does this book use them all, but it doesn't even attempt originality within this (lack of) constraint. Don't get me wrong--the book is satisfactory overall, though its ending is yet another predictable sci-fi trope. I genuinely cared about the characters Paolini created, but after I had counted three blatant ripoffs of major sci-fi plot points, well-known to anyone who reads or watches sci-fi religiously, I stopped counting... and that was only a few dozen pages in. (At one point, I actually said to myself that there wasn't time travel, but there is FTL travel, which is handled scientifically appropriately re: the passage of time in the universe, meaning that there is, in fact, monodirectional time travel.)

This book is not bad--as I said above, I did actually care about most of the characters in this world--but it is unoriginal.