Modern Monday - To Sleep In A Sea Of Stars: A Review

Christopher Paolini has not really been known as a science fiction writer. His Inheritance Cycle series, which begins with Eragon, his best-known work, has been a beloved set for fantasy readers for quite some time. But now he has crossed over into sci fi with a true space opera, and one which is good enough for Hugo Award consideration. To Sleep in a Sea of Stars.

The novel centers around the main character of Kira Navarez, a xenobiologist attached to the military, part of a survey team looking for habitable worlds. Her character is set up well, albeit a bit too thoroughly. (It takes rather long.) All she wants is to encounter alien life (beware what you wish for) and has been consumed with her career, but is in love with a man named Alan, whom she has spent too much time away from. She and Alan decide to get married and live as colonists, and in these early chapters, the scene is so lovey-dovey that one is certain things are about to go completely sideways.

They do. After picking up a strange reading, Kira decides to be thorough and do one more check before returning to her team. She finds a mineral deposit of a strange metal which is too pure to have occurred naturally. Then, she slips and falls into a crevasse, injuring her leg severely. She finds that she has fallen inside what appears to be an alien lab of some kind. Something resembling dust then attacks her, surrounds her, enters her mouth...

When she comes to, her comrades have rescued her, and something mysteriously healed her injuries. Because of her discovery, the entire system has been quarantined and no one can go home. This makes Kira less than popular. Yet otherwise, things seem fine. The medic can find nothing wrong with her, and she is reunited with Alan, her betrothed. But it has the feel of the movie Alien, except this time, John Hurt's character is the protagonist. Sure enough, the alien infection bursts out of her, bonds with her, attacks her crew-mates and kills them all - including her fiance.

When next she regains consciousness, the alien has bonded with her skin, forming a kind of suit. She cannot control it, she cannot remove it, and its presence has caused her to be sequestered from everyone. In a quarantined lab on board a ship called the Extenuating Circumstances, she is subjected to repeated, tortuous, and grueling tests. The crew of the ship believes that the alien skin-suit is somehow involved with a potential threat of invasion, and so any considerations for Kira's well-being are waylaid in favor or trying to understand what this skin-suit even is, and how they can control it. Blades can't cut through it. Bullets can't penetrate it. Only the highest-energy laser blasts seems capable of cutting it temporarily, causing Kira great pain. Then, an alien attack rips the Extenuating Circumstances apart.

The aliens are bulbous, tentacled, and utterly bizarre. Kira is shocked to find that she can understand their odd, scent-based language. Using her skin-suit, she kills one of them and escapes into deep space. Oddly, the suit forms a face-shield which protects her and gives her oxygen! She can't exactly control the suit, but it is powerful, can shoot out deadly spikes from her skin, and heals any battle-wounds almost instantly. She proceeds to a smaller, adjunct craft and survives, as do a handful of crew who take refuge on the nearby planet. With the destruction of the Extenuating Circumstances, the alien attack is warded off - for now. Kira decides to go to the next nearest system in an attempt to warn Sol of the pending alien invasion.

Along the way, she is picked up by a civilian vessel called the Wallfish - an Old English word which means "snail," even though the ship is anything but slow. The crew of the vessel are broke, in legal trouble, and don't quite trust her, except for one young boy who is utterly fascinated with anything to do with the aliens, who at this point are known as "Jellies." Eventually, the truth comes out about her situation, and about what her skin-suit really is. The crew take a calculated risk in trusting her.

Eventually, Kira comes to work with her skin-suit somewhat. It is a symbiotic life-form whose name translates (very loosely) as "The Soft Blade." Over time, she learns to control it, work with it, even listen to it, although it proves to be an uneasy and tortuous partnership.

Meanwhile, yet another alien menace threatens humanity. This new alien invader is known as The Nightmares, who are aptly named because their constantly-changing forms truly look like gruesome monstrosities. They wipe out the attacking Jellies - also known as Renari - but prove to be an even bigger threat.

From here, the tale takes a somewhat fantasy-themed turn. Through dreams induced by the Soft Blade, Kira learns about something called "The Staff of Blue," which the Soft Blade is convinced will win the war for whomever gets to it first. The Wallfish and her crew, along with additional military help, succeed in getting to the Staff first, only to find that it is not quite the salvation they were hoping for. The only hope for humanity's survival rests with Kira's ability to speak with the aliens, and the strange powers her bio-suit gives her. When she learns that the Nightmares were actually created by her own interactions with the suit, she must struggle with her own guilt as well as the invasion of TWO alien species.

All in all, this is an excellent space opera. It starts slow, builds even slower, and then gets punctuated with huge action scenes which leave the reader breathless. I cannot say more without spoiling the ending, so I won't.

The book does work a little too hard to create break-off threats which the protagonists must deal with in subsequent books. It feels forced. This book could have ended as a stand-alone and felt a lot better. I can only speculate what Paolini has in store for us. Perhaps it will be worthwhile, perhaps not. Also, one gets the impression that the whole story could have been told in a more concise way, especially at the beginning. There is also a series of appendices at the end which detail Paolini's world-building in precise detail, some of which are technically detailed. It's almost as if he's saying, "Hey, look! I can cook up sci-tech as well as any of  you!" And undoubtedly, he can. Putting these tech-details at the end also spares the reader a lot of exposition, and leaves it for the ravenously curious to pour over later on, should such readers choose to do so. That's fine, but to me, it almost seems like a form of bragging.

In conclusion, this is a triumph for Paolini, and puts him on the map for sci fi as one of the greats. I give it 4.75 out of 5 stars.

Welcome to space-nerd world, Christopher! May your fantasy fans not abandon you.

Eric

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