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A review by dembury
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini
2.0
One thing I love about sci-fi is that the genre allows for so much room for imagination, thinking outside what has already been done, and really pushing the boundaries of expectations. I thought there was going to be quite a lot of these things in TSIASOS, but unfortunately, this novel falls flat in many, many ways. While the core plot (a xenobiologist in space finds and physically bonds with a strange, alien orangism) is intriguing, the originality ends there and the actual story feels familiar and repetitive. I'm just going to bulletpoint a list of pros/cons to get out my thoughts on this 800+ page book:
PROS
-an alien organism that bonds with a human host à la "Venom". I genuinely love that setup and want to read more stories like that!
-the found family aspects. I'm a sucker for found family and just enjoying seeing it in books.
-the relationship between Kira and Itari, and their discussions together about culture, life, and morals. The discussions these two had were the most interesting parts of the book for me, and I think more of that content would have been amazing!
CONS
-the plot is SO. REPETITIVE. Arcs of action are practically copy/pasted and just rewritten in slightly different situations. This gets really bad when the crew is constantly going into cryogenic sleep as they travel back and forth between plants/space stations. After a while it really just feels like reading in circles, and makes the story veryyyy predictable and veryyyy boring.
-Kira, the main character, has zero personality. She's a xenobiologist who loves her fiancé, and she cares about her family.....and that's it. The lack of personality becomes apparent very quickly and makes the 800 pages seem even longer. I couldn't tell you what makes Kira happy, what her goals are (maybe having a house & family one day?), what motivates her, her beliefs, her emotional upbringing, her likes and dislikes (other than a drink called "chell"), just NOTHING. Kira is SO BLAND, it's like eating a piece of dried chicken with not even salt for flavor.
-Minor Spoiler here: no one major dies. Aside from the death of Alan (which happens within the first 10% so it's not really a spoiler) basically no major character we're meant to care about dies. This is especially annoying because the characters are constantly wounded/maimed/have life-threatening injuries but are all ultimately able to be saved by a vaguely defined sci-fi science. After a while of characters being saved time and time again, the story starts to feel very low-stakes.
-The idealization of the military/Marines. Holy cow, Paolini must have a thing for the military or something because there are just chunks of pages that talk about how cool Marines are, how cool guns are, how BUFF and RIPPED Marines are, how the Marines/military teach people such good values, etc. It felt like straight up military propaganda and was super weird, almost forced into the story multiple times.
-The long explanations of fictional science that add almost nothing to the story. There are paragraphs where a character or just the narration is explaining something about faster than light (FTL) travel or about the tech that makes this possible or something similar, and...for what?? These bits could have been significantly trimmed down but instead were dragged out, without ever adding anything to the plot.
-The ending. Bruh. That ending was both incredibly convoluted and way too Happily Ever After. I felt so cheated at the end of the book! Spoilers here, but essentially after the Big Bad is defeated, Kira is able to literally create this kind of utopia, followed by her gathering all her friends around (again, none of them died) and create magical, life-altering gifts for all of them in this incredibly cheesy scene that made me gag a little.
The thing that was so bad about this is that Kira basically stops becoming a human and is now a kind of god who can make or do anything. And when the story, the main character, has NO limits and anything is possible, then really nothing is possible. There are no obstacles, no challenges, nothing to actually create more of a story. It's no wonder the book ended there, because after this point, Kira can now do anything and the need for storytelling is gone.
This was one of my most anticipated books of 2020, but honestly is now the biggest letdown. I don't think I'd really ever recommended it either: if you love sci-fi stories then you've probably already read something similar or just BETTER than this, and if you don't like sci-fi then TSIASOS definitely isn't the place to start trying to like it. And if you're like me and enjoyed the Inheritance Cycle as a young reader and want more Paolini? Well....maybe just reread Eragon.
PROS
-an alien organism that bonds with a human host à la "Venom". I genuinely love that setup and want to read more stories like that!
-the found family aspects. I'm a sucker for found family and just enjoying seeing it in books.
-the relationship between Kira and Itari, and their discussions together about culture, life, and morals. The discussions these two had were the most interesting parts of the book for me, and I think more of that content would have been amazing!
CONS
-the plot is SO. REPETITIVE. Arcs of action are practically copy/pasted and just rewritten in slightly different situations. This gets really bad when the crew is constantly going into cryogenic sleep as they travel back and forth between plants/space stations. After a while it really just feels like reading in circles, and makes the story veryyyy predictable and veryyyy boring.
-Kira, the main character, has zero personality. She's a xenobiologist who loves her fiancé, and she cares about her family.....and that's it. The lack of personality becomes apparent very quickly and makes the 800 pages seem even longer. I couldn't tell you what makes Kira happy, what her goals are (maybe having a house & family one day?), what motivates her, her beliefs, her emotional upbringing, her likes and dislikes (other than a drink called "chell"), just NOTHING. Kira is SO BLAND, it's like eating a piece of dried chicken with not even salt for flavor.
-Minor Spoiler here: no one major dies. Aside from the death of Alan (which happens within the first 10% so it's not really a spoiler) basically no major character we're meant to care about dies. This is especially annoying because the characters are constantly wounded/maimed/have life-threatening injuries but are all ultimately able to be saved by a vaguely defined sci-fi science. After a while of characters being saved time and time again, the story starts to feel very low-stakes.
-The idealization of the military/Marines. Holy cow, Paolini must have a thing for the military or something because there are just chunks of pages that talk about how cool Marines are, how cool guns are, how BUFF and RIPPED Marines are, how the Marines/military teach people such good values, etc. It felt like straight up military propaganda and was super weird, almost forced into the story multiple times.
-The long explanations of fictional science that add almost nothing to the story. There are paragraphs where a character or just the narration is explaining something about faster than light (FTL) travel or about the tech that makes this possible or something similar, and...for what?? These bits could have been significantly trimmed down but instead were dragged out, without ever adding anything to the plot.
-The ending. Bruh. That ending was both incredibly convoluted and way too Happily Ever After. I felt so cheated at the end of the book! Spoilers here, but essentially after the Big Bad is defeated, Kira is able to literally create this kind of utopia, followed by her gathering all her friends around (again, none of them died) and create magical, life-altering gifts for all of them in this incredibly cheesy scene that made me gag a little.
The thing that was so bad about this is that Kira basically stops becoming a human and is now a kind of god who can make or do anything. And when the story, the main character, has NO limits and anything is possible, then really nothing is possible. There are no obstacles, no challenges, nothing to actually create more of a story. It's no wonder the book ended there, because after this point, Kira can now do anything and the need for storytelling is gone.
This was one of my most anticipated books of 2020, but honestly is now the biggest letdown. I don't think I'd really ever recommended it either: if you love sci-fi stories then you've probably already read something similar or just BETTER than this, and if you don't like sci-fi then TSIASOS definitely isn't the place to start trying to like it. And if you're like me and enjoyed the Inheritance Cycle as a young reader and want more Paolini? Well....maybe just reread Eragon.