Review of To Sleep In A Sea of Stars

To Sleep In A Sea of Stars

Author: Christopher Paolini

Publisher: Tor Books

Publication Date: September 2020

    First contact, romance, and warfare - what could possibly go wrong? 300 years in the future, humanity has ventured and colonized beyond the home solar system of Sol. Galactic exploration offers many jobs. Kira Navárez is a xenobiologist, which means that she gets to help colonize new planets while learning about their native flora and fauna. When she stumbles across a rock pile on a foreign planet that contains an alien relic, she is delighted… until the relic moves. Kira is thrown not just into a personal biological crisis, but an intergalactic war. First contact sends her to the limits of explored space in the fight to save her species. But it also leads her on a remarkable journey of discovery and self-transformation.

    To Sleep In A Sea of Stars is marvelous. The writing spares no detail, helping readers to inhabit both the story and Kira’s perspective. The dialogue, cursing included, is believable; it meshes with the descriptive writing, allowing characters and plot to develop together. Description and dialogue also support the rapid pace, keeping Paolini from overwhelming or confusing the reader. Kira is an arresting character who grows with - and because of - the events thrust upon her. For a xenobiologist like Kira, interacting with life forms usually means gathering samples and studying them in a lab. First contact with an extraterrestrial sentient species would ordinarily be a dream come true, but the sentient species she finds seems to want to kill her and the entirety of humanity. Being forced to comprehend a fundamentally alien perspective tests Kira’s character and intelligence. Because Kira is an empathetic person capable of both fierce love and easy kinship, her crisis evokes more than just horror and suspense. Her love and protectiveness for the people she considers her friends never leaves, helping to sustain her as the rest of her world falls apart.

    820 pages might seem excessive for a novel about one woman finding some friends and fighting some aliens. But it’s not. To Sleep In A Sea of Stars explores the curiosity and passion that drives us to explore the galaxy, and the intelligence and sensitivity that makes us capable of connecting with the aliens we wish to find. This is Paolini’s first science fiction novel, and he puts his experience as a fantasy author to good use in creating a truly “other” alien species. I would recommend To Sleep In A Sea of Stars to older YA science fiction and fantasy readers looking to deeply connect with a story that explores the boundaries of humanity. 

- D. K. Nuray

Review of Nucleation

Nucleation

Author: Kimberly Unger

Publisher: Tachyon Publications

Publication Date: November 2020

    As an operator for the company Far Reaches in an age of private space exploration, Helen Vectorovich’s job is to pilot vehicles, known as waldos, billions of miles away. She does so from her “coffin”, which allows her to merge her own senses with those of her distant waldo. Helen is an elite explorer who never directly faces danger - until she suddenly does. When a routine mission turns deadly, Helen must fight to save both her job and her life while searching for the saboteur. Junior pilots jockeying to replace her, rival companies trying to take control of the botched mission, and bad rumors about her sanity spreading give Helen more than enough challenges. Her situation gets worse when it begins to appear that the mission’s failure may not have been an accident.

    From the first page, Nucleation has no shortage of perils and surprises, but the fierce, ingenious character of Helen carries the story as much as the plot. As an operator, Helen has to exist in and understand two places - her own world and that of her waldo. This tension is the story’s mainspring. For readers who find the large number of scientific and technical terms confusing, the dialogue between Helen and her colleagues and the momentum of the plot keeps the story intriguing. Helen is part Hermione Granger and part Lara Croft blazing through a fast-paced story that is part science fiction, part space western. Nucleation can feel like too much action crammed between the covers, but this is a forgivable excess. I recommend this novel for middle grade and YA readers who enjoy speculative fiction adventure, fast-paced action, and resourceful female characters and don’t mind some colorful language.

- D. K. Nuray