Once upon a time, a 16 year old boy penned a fantasy series that went on to be a best seller. Now that boy has matured and taken his work to the stars. Christopher Paolini's latest work is extremely divergent from his best selling Inheritance Cycle. Now, grounded firmly in our world, he sets out to deliver a new science fiction epic which tells the tale of war among the planets near and around Earth.
The story begins on Adrasteia, a small possibly habitable moon orbiting the gas giant Zeus in the Sigma Draconis system. There xenobiologist Kira Navarez is working with a survey team to help catalogue the planets few indigenous lifeforms while the planet itself is prepared for terraforming. However, during her searches, she stumbles across something she doesn't understand.
Finding herself bonded with an alien artifact she is first poked and prodded by the forces of the League of Allied Worlds and the UMC (United Military Command) only to then be attacked by sentient aliens in a first contact scenario gone horribly wrong. With humanity suddenly at war, she may be their only hope at peace, or humanity may ending up sleeping forever in a sea of cold stars.
This work is one which is well grounded in speculative science fiction. From the way humans travel between star systems, the power for ships, the ship design and the various other aspects, I found myself greatly enjoying the near future (2257) that Paolini presented. It was both enjoyably alien and utterly relatable. That made it easy to get lost in the world he crafted, and gave me many hours of pleasurable reading. That there's a handy glossary in the back helped immenseley with keeping the various technologies and ideas straight.
The aliens too were quite intriguing. It made them as alien as possible without being uninterpretable. I won't spoil too much about them, but audiences are bound to be fascinated by the Jelly's as humans come to know them.
We also have a very strong cast. Kira is our only view point character, and we largely interact with the world through her eyes and senses. She goes from being a completely normal human, to something very much beyond, that. She interacts first with her own crewmates on the small survey team, the UMC on the UMCS Extenuating Circumstances, and finally, the very eclectic crew of the SLV Wallfish.
Out of all these groups we get to know the Wallfish crew the best. There's the gruff but surprisingly deep Captain Falconi, First Officer Nielsen, the excitable young Trig, taciturn Sparrow, machine-boss Hwa-Jung, crew's doctor Vishal and finally the possibly insane ship's-mind Gregoravitch. They all mesh very well together and create a cast I was very fond of and wanted to see succeed. I truly felt the peril for them as Paolini does not spare anyone if he can help it. And through the diverse cast he establishes the world quite creatively.
The story goes through various acts, broken up quite cleverly by FTL trips. In these we get more introspective and emotional moments, ones that really help define Kira as a character. From those we get to different star systems different action scenes, and many, many exciting new discoveries. All of which come together in a reasonably satisfying conclusion.
Sea of Stars is a long book, and it covers quite a lot of ground. However, it throws a lot of information at you. I found that there was probably too much crammed into a single volume. Just as we're getting used to the idea that humanity is in a war for its survival from an alien species another curveball is thrown at you. Then another, then another. No spoilers but I went from understanding to what the Jellys are to having to try and understand what nightmares are, what the Heptarchy is, and why I should care. Even at over 800 pages, there's almost far too many balls in the air. After the second and third acts the book manages to calm down and focus, but it still left almost too much to be solved in the final act.
While the story does set itself up nicely for sequels in an expanded universe, it did leave me struggling to piece together more than a few disparate threads.
The story though, does a good job exploring the future. Human and alien relations, and of course, an expanded sense of the self and the impact on a person this would have. Well worth delving in to if you're looking for a great new science fiction read.
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