I don’t know about you but I’m getting pretty tired of SF novels that are really just action / adventure / war stories set in outer space. It seems to me that outer space is just too big and life in it too rare for alien civilizations to just start fighting the instant they encounter each other. That’s exactly what ‘To Sleep in a Sea of Stars ‘ is however, one long, very long novel of battle after battle with little rhyme or reason to it.
It starts out interestingly enough; Kira Navarez is an exo-biologist, a member of a team of explorers who are surveying the planet Adrasteia in a distant solar system in order to ascertain whether it would make a suitable colony for human beings. Kira is on a routine mission when she stops to investigate a strange outcropping of rock and before she realizes that it is an alien structure she is infected with an alien xenomorph, a thing that is part living and part machine.
As her team members try to remove the xeno from her several are killed by it, including her fiancé Alan. If this part of the story kinda reminds you of the beginning of the movie ‘Alien’ get used to it. A lot of ‘To Sleep in a Sea of Stars’ will remind you of a lot of other stories.
A military starship from Earth manages to seize Kira and put her in isolation where they begin to experiment on the xeno, and Kira. Suddenly an alien spaceship appears and the two starships immediately begin fighting. During the battle Kira manages to escape and in a space pod heads back to the nearest human colony where she expects that she will again be seized by the military.
Instead she winds up on a broken-down half-space worthy ship called the Wallfish whose crew are a ragtag bunch of misfits. You know the type, rejects from polite society but who nevertheless have a heart of gold. It doesn’t take long to figure out that the Wallfish is just a bigger version of the Millennium Falcon crewed by a dozen different versions of Han Solo.
Meanwhile the aliens are now attacking humanity everywhere while Kira is forced to learn how to live with the xeno, which is a sort of skin enveloping her. As she begins to learn how to control it, a process that takes an awful lot of pages, you start to think of the thing as a kind of Iron Man suit and as the story goes on Kira gains more control over it becoming more and more powerful in the process.
One thing Kira discovers is that the suit, whose name is the Soft Blade, allows her to understand the language of the aliens and she begins to put together a plan to somehow use the xeno’s power to stop the war. The aliens by the way are a sort of cross between squids and arthropods that the humans begin calling Jellies. Incidentally the Jellies did not make the Soft Blade but they want it for its power.
Before Kira can even finish formulating her plan stop the war however another alien species appears and immediately begins to attack everybody, Humans and Jellies. These newcomers are vile, ugly, half made creatures that humans call Nightmares and the Jellies call the Corrupted. I quickly began to imagine them as the army of the Dead in Game of Thrones. Again the author just seems to throw in ideas from all over the place.
The novel goes on and on like this for more than 800 pages, battle scene after battle scene, with Kira learning how to control the Soft Blade a little better between each fight. Another annoying thing about the book is that, during every fight there’s a point where Kira thinks that the situation is hopeless, there’s simply no way out until suddenly the cavalry arrives in the nick of time, or she somehow discovers a new power that the Soft Blade has. It all gets a bit redundant after a while.
And to top it all off, after fighting her way across half the galaxy the author decides to get kinda mystic at the climax as Kira uses the Soft Blade’s true powers to sort of just heal everyone. Really, the ending left me feeling like, you couldn’t have done that about 700 pages ago?
Still, if you are the sort who enjoys a good laser battle with starships firing anti-matter bombs at each other rather than a thought-provoking story you may enjoy ‘To Sleep in a Sea of Stars’. Be warned however, it is a long story with a lot of redundancy.