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A review by tenasadie
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini
slow-paced
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
0.5
Over the summer of 2020, Tor hosted an event with Christopher Paolini and Brandon Sanderson in promotion for their forthcoming books in the fall. It was painfully obvious from very early in the conversation that Paolini had not only not read Sanderson's book (or its prequels), but that he was far more occupied with himself; Sanderson had obviously read a good portion of Paolini's book, and was prepared with questions. It was deeply cringeworthy to watch Paolini squirm and congratulate himself on the many edits of this book.
Let's start with a summary, and then we'll pick apart what makes To Sleep in a Sea of Stars so hollow. Summary below the spoiler cut:
[Part One: Kira Navárez is a xenobiologist. Her boyfriend, Alan, proposes to her on the last night of their survey mission to Adrasteia. The next morning, Kira goes out to investigate a downed drone and stumbles upon some kind of alien ruin, and is knocked out in some kind of attack. When she comes to, it's been four weeks, and the survey team have been stuck on the planet, forbidden to leave; after breakfast the next morning, it becomes clear that Kira ingested some kind of xeno-species when it begins attacking her team and ultimately killing her boyfriend/fiancé (by sticking him through with thorns while he attempted to protect her, no less) and a few others.
Kira wakes up again on the Extenuating Circumstances, a UMC ship, in isolation. She is put through nothing shy of torture to see what the xeno can do, as it is now covering her entire body. The tests are disrupted when some kind of attack happens to the ship, forcing Kira to leave in a shuttle. Six crew members, including Major Tschetter, survive, and four leave the system with Kira. The four of them are in cryogenic stasis; the xeno will not tolerate Kira being put under. She listens to Bach for 80 days on their way to the next system.
Part Two: Kira wakes on the Wallfish, who rescued her escape shuttle ten days later than it was projected to arrive at its destination. The crew help and do not question her. She learns of the Jellies, an alien species who have been attacking. The xeno gives her strange dreams. Kira reveals what the xeno is to the crew; its name, as revealed to her on the trip, is the Soft Blade.
After an attack by a Jelly ship, the Wallfish crew board the wreckage, and Kira learns she can speak their language. She investigates the ship and sends some kind of signal out, and has a vision of something called the Staff of Blue. A new alien species appears - the nightmares. The Wallfish goes to the nearest station moments before an attack by both Jellies and nightmares (the new alien species), and Kira somehow negotiates to get the Wallfish crew (along with a UMC ship) to go across the galaxy to get the Staff of Blue. According to Kira and the Soft Blade's memories, the Staff of Blue is really important, but we don't ever find out exactly why.
They depart with posthaste, and Kira listens to more Bach while everyone else is in cryo. She also trains with the Soft Blade.
Part Three: Upon arriving at the system where the Staff of Blue is, its star is promptly given a name, and Kira is able to determine approximately where the item is. She and a small landing party go into an ancient alien city, are attacked by Jellies and nightmares, and at last manage to find where the Staff of Blue is. It's broken! During a fight, a nightmare grabs Kira, and she learns that she accidentally created the nightmares when she was tortured and subsequently attacked. The Soft Blade separated, and the part that was split from her absorbed the scientist torturing her and the Jelly that was attacking. It's very hungry and called The Maw.
One of the crewmembers is shot. Tschetter shows up again as an ally to the Jellies, and brokers a peace between a rebel group of the Jellies and the Wallfish crew. The Wallfish crew are going to convince the UMC to side with this faction and attack the leader of the Jellies, Ctien, with intent to kill. Wallfish heads back for the Sol system, so everyone's down into cryo.
More training, more Bach, and arrival to the system with Earth.
Part Four: Orsted Station hails the Wallfish for docking. Surprise, it's a hostile capture of the Wallfish! Kira busts everyone out, violently, and learns the limits of the Soft Blade. The Wallfish barely escapes, and its ship mind tries to mutiny, and is then shut into his little bunker, where Kira has a few of the most interesting conversations of the book with him. While FTL traveling - over three weeks - to the Cordova system, she learns the Soft Blade's name is really the Seed, and she grows a little jungle in her room.
Part Five: Showdown at Cordova. We have the obligatory "no one goes in alone" group hug from the Wallfish crew, which feels trite and hollow. Long, meaningless fights ensue. Kira has a prolonged boss battle with Ctien and wins by turning him into a similar odd rock formation to where she first discovered the Soft Blade. The Maw arrives then, and she has an existential crisis as it begins to absorb her/she begins to absorb it. And then...
Part Six: Kira absorbs the Maw and begins building an organic space station with the unlocked memories of the Soft Blade/Seed. She brokers an official peace between humans and Jellies, and kills the final nightmares. She bestows gifts to the Wallfish crew. Great news: there are seven fragments of the Maw out in the void, and she's going to go get them! The book ends on her leaving to travel to hunt them down, and hearing her family is alive.
The characters: To Sleep in a Sea of Stars is allegedly about a motley crew who become family, even in the face of adversity. Falconi, the captain, has scars and a tragic past, and an obsession with pigs. Nielsen has biological enhancements that are killing her. Vishal is the Indian-coded doctor who mentions Hinduism once and is otherwise Christian. Hwa-jung is the Asian woman, but she is monstrously large from living on a low-oxygen planet, and her girlfriend Sparrow, the ex-Marine who suddenly becomes Latina in the last 200 pages. Trig is a teenager who spends most of the book in cryo, and when he's not, he's too tongue-tied to say anything of value. And, most importantly, Gregorovich, the slightly-demented ship mind (sentient brain that controls the ship).
None of them matter. We aren't given any reason to care about them. They are all cardboard cutouts, strategically placed in the book to give Kira someone to interact with. None of them are interesting or unique, just...there. At worst, they're racist caricatures: Hwa-jung, for example, is noted to be "moon-faced," is suspiciously subservient, an obsessive perfectionist, and aggressively protective. It's no mistake that the Asian-coded planet is outside the League of human-settled worlds; Paolini leans into the yellow peril trope and brings it to space with him. Larger-than-human humans who make very advanced technology? Must be space Asians. This isn't to mention that the only non-hetero couple in the book, Hwa-jung and Sparrow, are both too outside what is conventionally attractive to be in heterosexual relationships.
Kira, the heart of our story, is barely compelling. Her defining characteristic, pre-Soft Blade, is that she is a xenobiologist. Paolini goes out of his way to inflict pain on this woman and never bothers to make her a compelling protagonist. She's the protagonist because she has to be, nothing more. She's able to gain access anywhere simply by telling the ranking official that she has the xeno and she's the only one who's able to do whatever it is, and they wave her through with minimal grumbling.
The Plot: Every section, save sections five and six, follows the exact same pattern. Kira wakes up. Action sequence. Explosions. Something expository. Decision is made to go somewhere else. Conversation with a crew member. Everyone goes into cryo. Kira trains and listens to Bach. Rinse and repeat over and over and over. I read this book attentively and cannot tell you what the throughline of the plot is. I think Kira mentions once that her goal is to be a translator for the humans and Jellies, but she never does that. Each section is written as though it was its own novella, left to marinate, and then strung lazily together. The gaping holes left in the plot make for a thoroughly unsatisfying reading experience. Here is a small sampling of the plot holes and lack of explanations:
1. Leaving Adra and leaving Tschetter behind. Once Tschetter returns to the story, she leaves someone there. Adra is not important after part one.
2. Inarë, the Angela stand-in, talks to Kira aboard the Wallfish. Kira accidentally spears Bob the Numenist, and Inarë is interviewed and calls Kira "Starfury." We never hear that name again and never see Inarë again. It's heavily implied through her appendix entry that Inarë is actually Angela, which, how do you mess up your best character that badly?!
3. The Staff of Blue. And the Seeker, an ancient mind-altering alien robot thing, which Paolini promptly forgets about and mentions once again to say that it's out somewhere in space.
4. The Premier of the League. No one knows who he is, but they follow his commands. How mysterious and cool to drop a political story in the middle of this! That is the only time we hear about the Premier.
5. This was all action, so fine.
6. The seven fragments of the Maw.
Any time something new cropped up, I felt more and more frustrated. There's no need to add these threads to an already-packed book! They don't contribute anything, and in fact, just highlight how weak Paolini is as an author. He clearly only knows how to write one kind of book, and that book is not a science fiction book. This is a quest fantasy, just in space, and the aliens and technology are just window dressings for what is, at its heart, the exact same story he told in Inheritance. It is disappointing, more than anything, to have such hollow characters telling an exhausted story packed with bland tropes. Using tropes can be good, but when this reads more like a list of fantasy tropes, it's not enjoyable.
This is billed as a first contact story, but we don't have any of the elements to make it a story about first contact. Generally, first contact stories about who we are as humans and what that contact teaches us about our nature. This has none of those elements. We don't learn anything about the nature of the human race. We don't have any reason to care, really. We don't know anything about the Jellies that can act as a mirror for humanity. We don't even learn about the race that created the Soft Blade to hold up as a mirror for humanity. Again, it is just hollow storytelling with the trappings of scifi, draped over a fantasy.
The language: I could have easily cut 100k words out of this book, and that's being generous. There are so many pointless words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and even scenes in this book. I'm so sick of white male authors publishing "the book as it was intended to be," because often that means that an editor laid minimal hands on it. If someone did edit this, they should have to take a long, hard look at what they unleashed upon the world, for it is dense, overly verbose, and totally lacking in quips and wit. The language doesn't propel the story forward, it is there to be there, and show how knowledgeable Paolini is. One of the big selling points was the subtle nerd references; I personally think nerd reference culture is toxic, and this book exemplifies that. None of the references are subtle - Paolini all but bludgeons you with referential material in his Firefly fanfiction big space book. Sometimes, hundreds of pages after a term is introduced, we get a parenthetical explanation for it.
Don't get me started on the appendix. If you cannot incorporate the material naturally into your story, it doesn't belong there. I shouldn't have had to read about the Wranaui - the Jellies - in the appendix, I should have read about them in the book itself. I don't need an entry on something that comes up once and is totally irrelevant. I don't need it at all. The appendix was a self-congratulatory piece of "worldbuilding" that did not build anything. And, to go back to language for a moment: why continue to use "Jellies" when we know they are the Wranaui? This seems like a strange editorial choice. "Wranaui" is much more alien than "Jelly." Maybe that's just me.
I understand Paolini spoke with scientists and science-types for research. If only we had more of that cool science stuff in the book!
In conclusion: this was a retelling of Paolini's Inheritance books set in space and was unbelievably disappointing. For such an anticipated book, with the fanfare it received from Tor, it was embarrassingly awful and contrived. If you are looking for a scifi book about first contact, this is anything but the story you are looking for. Do not waste your time slogging through this barren landscape where a great story could have been told, and do not look for the story that could have been: you will not find it here.
Let's start with a summary, and then we'll pick apart what makes To Sleep in a Sea of Stars so hollow. Summary below the spoiler cut:
Kira wakes up again on the Extenuating Circumstances, a UMC ship, in isolation. She is put through nothing shy of torture to see what the xeno can do, as it is now covering her entire body. The tests are disrupted when some kind of attack happens to the ship, forcing Kira to leave in a shuttle. Six crew members, including Major Tschetter, survive, and four leave the system with Kira. The four of them are in cryogenic stasis; the xeno will not tolerate Kira being put under. She listens to Bach for 80 days on their way to the next system.
Part Two: Kira wakes on the Wallfish, who rescued her escape shuttle ten days later than it was projected to arrive at its destination. The crew help and do not question her. She learns of the Jellies, an alien species who have been attacking. The xeno gives her strange dreams. Kira reveals what the xeno is to the crew; its name, as revealed to her on the trip, is the Soft Blade.
After an attack by a Jelly ship, the Wallfish crew board the wreckage, and Kira learns she can speak their language. She investigates the ship and sends some kind of signal out, and has a vision of something called the Staff of Blue. A new alien species appears - the nightmares. The Wallfish goes to the nearest station moments before an attack by both Jellies and nightmares (the new alien species), and Kira somehow negotiates to get the Wallfish crew (along with a UMC ship) to go across the galaxy to get the Staff of Blue. According to Kira and the Soft Blade's memories, the Staff of Blue is really important, but we don't ever find out exactly why.
They depart with posthaste, and Kira listens to more Bach while everyone else is in cryo. She also trains with the Soft Blade.
Part Three: Upon arriving at the system where the Staff of Blue is, its star is promptly given a name, and Kira is able to determine approximately where the item is. She and a small landing party go into an ancient alien city, are attacked by Jellies and nightmares, and at last manage to find where the Staff of Blue is. It's broken! During a fight, a nightmare grabs Kira, and she learns that she accidentally created the nightmares when she was tortured and subsequently attacked. The Soft Blade separated, and the part that was split from her absorbed the scientist torturing her and the Jelly that was attacking. It's very hungry and called The Maw.
One of the crewmembers is shot. Tschetter shows up again as an ally to the Jellies, and brokers a peace between a rebel group of the Jellies and the Wallfish crew. The Wallfish crew are going to convince the UMC to side with this faction and attack the leader of the Jellies, Ctien, with intent to kill. Wallfish heads back for the Sol system, so everyone's down into cryo.
More training, more Bach, and arrival to the system with Earth.
Part Four: Orsted Station hails the Wallfish for docking. Surprise, it's a hostile capture of the Wallfish! Kira busts everyone out, violently, and learns the limits of the Soft Blade. The Wallfish barely escapes, and its ship mind tries to mutiny, and is then shut into his little bunker, where Kira has a few of the most interesting conversations of the book with him. While FTL traveling - over three weeks - to the Cordova system, she learns the Soft Blade's name is really the Seed, and she grows a little jungle in her room.
Part Five: Showdown at Cordova. We have the obligatory "no one goes in alone" group hug from the Wallfish crew, which feels trite and hollow. Long, meaningless fights ensue. Kira has a prolonged boss battle with Ctien and wins by turning him into a similar odd rock formation to where she first discovered the Soft Blade. The Maw arrives then, and she has an existential crisis as it begins to absorb her/she begins to absorb it. And then...
Part Six: Kira absorbs the Maw and begins building an organic space station with the unlocked memories of the Soft Blade/Seed. She brokers an official peace between humans and Jellies, and kills the final nightmares. She bestows gifts to the Wallfish crew. Great news: there are seven fragments of the Maw out in the void, and she's going to go get them! The book ends on her leaving to travel to hunt them down, and hearing her family is alive.
The characters: To Sleep in a Sea of Stars is allegedly about a motley crew who become family, even in the face of adversity. Falconi, the captain, has scars and a tragic past, and an obsession with pigs. Nielsen has biological enhancements that are killing her. Vishal is the Indian-coded doctor who mentions Hinduism once and is otherwise Christian. Hwa-jung is the Asian woman, but she is monstrously large from living on a low-oxygen planet, and her girlfriend Sparrow, the ex-Marine who suddenly becomes Latina in the last 200 pages. Trig is a teenager who spends most of the book in cryo, and when he's not, he's too tongue-tied to say anything of value. And, most importantly, Gregorovich, the slightly-demented ship mind (sentient brain that controls the ship).
None of them matter. We aren't given any reason to care about them. They are all cardboard cutouts, strategically placed in the book to give Kira someone to interact with. None of them are interesting or unique, just...there. At worst, they're racist caricatures: Hwa-jung, for example, is noted to be "moon-faced," is suspiciously subservient, an obsessive perfectionist, and aggressively protective. It's no mistake that the Asian-coded planet is outside the League of human-settled worlds; Paolini leans into the yellow peril trope and brings it to space with him. Larger-than-human humans who make very advanced technology? Must be space Asians. This isn't to mention that the only non-hetero couple in the book, Hwa-jung and Sparrow, are both too outside what is conventionally attractive to be in heterosexual relationships.
Kira, the heart of our story, is barely compelling. Her defining characteristic, pre-Soft Blade, is that she is a xenobiologist. Paolini goes out of his way to inflict pain on this woman and never bothers to make her a compelling protagonist. She's the protagonist because she has to be, nothing more. She's able to gain access anywhere simply by telling the ranking official that she has the xeno and she's the only one who's able to do whatever it is, and they wave her through with minimal grumbling.
The Plot: Every section, save sections five and six, follows the exact same pattern. Kira wakes up. Action sequence. Explosions. Something expository. Decision is made to go somewhere else. Conversation with a crew member. Everyone goes into cryo. Kira trains and listens to Bach. Rinse and repeat over and over and over. I read this book attentively and cannot tell you what the throughline of the plot is. I think Kira mentions once that her goal is to be a translator for the humans and Jellies, but she never does that. Each section is written as though it was its own novella, left to marinate, and then strung lazily together. The gaping holes left in the plot make for a thoroughly unsatisfying reading experience. Here is a small sampling of the plot holes and lack of explanations:
1. Leaving Adra and leaving Tschetter behind. Once Tschetter returns to the story, she leaves someone there. Adra is not important after part one.
2. Inarë, the Angela stand-in, talks to Kira aboard the Wallfish. Kira accidentally spears Bob the Numenist, and Inarë is interviewed and calls Kira "Starfury." We never hear that name again and never see Inarë again. It's heavily implied through her appendix entry that Inarë is actually Angela, which, how do you mess up your best character that badly?!
3. The Staff of Blue. And the Seeker, an ancient mind-altering alien robot thing, which Paolini promptly forgets about and mentions once again to say that it's out somewhere in space.
4. The Premier of the League. No one knows who he is, but they follow his commands. How mysterious and cool to drop a political story in the middle of this! That is the only time we hear about the Premier.
5. This was all action, so fine.
6. The seven fragments of the Maw.
Any time something new cropped up, I felt more and more frustrated. There's no need to add these threads to an already-packed book! They don't contribute anything, and in fact, just highlight how weak Paolini is as an author. He clearly only knows how to write one kind of book, and that book is not a science fiction book. This is a quest fantasy, just in space, and the aliens and technology are just window dressings for what is, at its heart, the exact same story he told in Inheritance. It is disappointing, more than anything, to have such hollow characters telling an exhausted story packed with bland tropes. Using tropes can be good, but when this reads more like a list of fantasy tropes, it's not enjoyable.
This is billed as a first contact story, but we don't have any of the elements to make it a story about first contact. Generally, first contact stories about who we are as humans and what that contact teaches us about our nature. This has none of those elements. We don't learn anything about the nature of the human race. We don't have any reason to care, really. We don't know anything about the Jellies that can act as a mirror for humanity. We don't even learn about the race that created the Soft Blade to hold up as a mirror for humanity. Again, it is just hollow storytelling with the trappings of scifi, draped over a fantasy.
The language: I could have easily cut 100k words out of this book, and that's being generous. There are so many pointless words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and even scenes in this book. I'm so sick of white male authors publishing "the book as it was intended to be," because often that means that an editor laid minimal hands on it. If someone did edit this, they should have to take a long, hard look at what they unleashed upon the world, for it is dense, overly verbose, and totally lacking in quips and wit. The language doesn't propel the story forward, it is there to be there, and show how knowledgeable Paolini is. One of the big selling points was the subtle nerd references; I personally think nerd reference culture is toxic, and this book exemplifies that. None of the references are subtle - Paolini all but bludgeons you with referential material in his Firefly fanfiction big space book. Sometimes, hundreds of pages after a term is introduced, we get a parenthetical explanation for it.
Don't get me started on the appendix. If you cannot incorporate the material naturally into your story, it doesn't belong there. I shouldn't have had to read about the Wranaui - the Jellies - in the appendix, I should have read about them in the book itself. I don't need an entry on something that comes up once and is totally irrelevant. I don't need it at all. The appendix was a self-congratulatory piece of "worldbuilding" that did not build anything. And, to go back to language for a moment: why continue to use "Jellies" when we know they are the Wranaui? This seems like a strange editorial choice. "Wranaui" is much more alien than "Jelly." Maybe that's just me.
I understand Paolini spoke with scientists and science-types for research. If only we had more of that cool science stuff in the book!
In conclusion: this was a retelling of Paolini's Inheritance books set in space and was unbelievably disappointing. For such an anticipated book, with the fanfare it received from Tor, it was embarrassingly awful and contrived. If you are looking for a scifi book about first contact, this is anything but the story you are looking for. Do not waste your time slogging through this barren landscape where a great story could have been told, and do not look for the story that could have been: you will not find it here.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Body horror and Torture