To Sleep in a Sea of Stars Spork: Part 1, Chapter 10: Exeunt 1

[ultimate_cheetah]

This chapter is unnecessary. It literally just consists of Kira travelling, eating, and learning the alien’s name, yet somehow takes up longer than this spork.

The chapter is called Exeunt 1. For those not familiar, exeunt is an old-timey word meaning “exit”, and it appears at the end of acts in plays. The chapter title makes it sound like Paolini’s trying to come off as “sophisticated” here. It doesn’t work. Pro tip: If you want your work to sound sophisticated, then the writing needs to be sophisticated. Fancy words and titles can’t replace that.

Kira is looking at herself in the “Markov bubble”, which is basically a bubble that insulates the ship from the superluminal universe. I don’t know why the bubble would be reflective, and I don’t know how the Markov drive could transport matter. However, I won’t pretend to know the science. Hopefully someone more qualified than me can explain it in the comments.

Kira has never been awake for FTL, so she is interested in all this. We get a paragraph of infodump, and then:

Kira remembered a description her fourth-year physics teacher had once used: “Going faster than light is like traveling in a straight line along a right angle.” The phrase had stuck with her, and the more she’d learned of the math, the more she’d realized how accurate it was.

Why the heck is a xenobiologist learning advanced physics? And of course the xenobiologist who couldn’t calculate how long the ration packs would last her has a physics degree. You’re not fooling me, Paolini.

Kira asks the computer to play the complete works of Bach, on a loop. In a personal touch, he’s her favorite composer. I like Chopin myself, but you do you Kira.

Kira felt herself begin to relax. The structure of Bach had always appealed to her: the cold, clean mathematical beauty of one theme slotting into another, building, exploring, transforming. And when each piece resolved, the resolution was so immensely satisfying. No other composer gave her that feeling.

Music is about emotion. That’s why we like it so much. This description seems like it’s from someone who isn’t into music at all. But anyway, if Kira wants a satisfying resolution, I think someone needs to introduce her to “Prelude in E minor”.

Kira decides to give the alien a name, because it saved her. She does acknowledge that she wouldn’t have been in danger without it, but she still feels “gratitude and confidence.” Because nothing makes you confident like having a crazy death-suit attached to your body!

Kira tries to name the suit Obsidian, but the alien rejects it, probably because the name is cliche as all hell. Through images and sensations, the alien tells her its name. Before I get into the name reveal, I would like to point something out. This is the only time that the suit communicates in a way like this. Otherwise, it’s dream visions. I actually like this, since there is no reason for the suit to know Kira’s language. This would’ve worked for Saphira, too, since it’s less human. Unfortunately, the suit becomes an accessory after this. This had so much potential! Imagine if Kira had to learn how to communicate with it.Struggling with how to get along would be an actual conflict, and it would provide a setup for the climax (which, as it is, comes right out of nowhere).

Kira then waxes lyrical about the suit’s name:

It was a complex name, composed of and embodied by a web of interrelated concepts that she realized would probably take her years to fully parse, if ever. However, as the concepts filtered through her mind, she couldn’t help but assign words to them. She was only human, after all; language was as much a part of her as consciousness itself. The words failed to capture the subtleties of the name—because she herself didn’t understand them—but they captured the broadest and most obvious aspects.

*Snicker snicker.* We all know where this is going. The name?

The Soft Blade.

As opposed to the Hard Blade?

Kira sees the suit as a companion now that she knows it has a name. The name I will now give it is Limp Dick. Apparently, whoever named the alien “possessed a sense of elegance and poetry”. Or they possessed a dirty sense of humor and a few bottles of wine. Kira goes to sleep and has a weird dream/vision. It’s written in this weird pseudo-fantasy way, which really clashes with the previous prose style. Here’s an example:

Falling. Softly falling within the blue-black reaches of the swelling sea. Past lamp and sway, through wafts of heat and chill, softly fell and softly swam. And from the folds of swirling darkness emerged a massive form, there upon the Plaintive Verge: a mound of pitted rock, and rooted atop that rock … rooted atop that rock …

Not to mention this is confusing as heck. What is the alien even talking about.? The massive form?Also, “Softly falling within the blue-black reaches of the swelling sea.” is a sentence fragment. So is “Past lamp and sway, through wafts of heat and chill, softly fell and softly swam.” With my authority as the GRAMMAR POLICE CHIEF, I hereby slap Paolini with a fine of three crimson rubies and an ice cream sandwich. Pay the cashier at the front.

Sowing confusion is fine, but you have to satisfy it, and the dream visions are never fully resolved.

Kira woke, confused.

Her and me both.

It was still dark, and for a moment, she knew neither where she was nor how she had gotten there, only that she was falling from a terrible height—

She yelped and flailed, and her elbow hit the control panel next to the pilot’s seat. The impact jolted her back to full awareness, and she realized she was still on the Valkyrie and that the Bach was still playing.

This would’ve been good, except that the narration is disconnected from Kira. For example, she shouldn’t know that her elbow hit the control panel. She should still think she’s dreaming. It would be better if we experienced the moment of awareness with Kira instead of before her. It’s little things like this that make the prose weaker.

Kira thinks about the dream for a while, wondering about who made Limp Dick and if she can separate from it. She notices that this weird dust is coating Limp Dick. Apparently, it’s Limp Dick’s waste. … … She’s covered in alien poop. This is absolutely disgusting. Kira doesn’t do what I would do, which is get to the nearest water source and jump in it, and instead thinks about how the alien could do this. I literally do not care. I came here to read about action and alien wars, not about how an alien excretes.

The next part is literally Kira sleeping and eating. The excitement might literally kill me. Kira runs out of ration packs. Oh, the humanity. How will I go on?

Now came the hard part: no more food. For a moment, she thought of the cryo tubes at the back of the shuttle—and of Orso’s offer—but as before, her mind rebelled against the idea. She would rather starve than resort to eating another person. Maybe her stance would change as she wasted away, but Kira felt certain it wouldn’t.

Really??? What was the point of all that in the last chapter, then?

Kira goes back to sleep. I envy her. I’d rather be sleeping at this point. Kira’s very hungry. How horrible. Then Limp Dick, being an otherworldly alien with survival instincts, takes over Kira and starts eating Orso’s leg- wait, no it doesn’t. Kira just prays to Thule (whom we know nothing about except that he’s the god of spacers) and goes to sleep. And that’s the end of the chapter.

My verdict? So. Damn. Boring. You could cut all of this out and you wouldn’t miss a thing. I think the parts with Limp Dick should be folded into the previous chapter. The rest should be just. Have the last chapter end with her travelling, and then cut to the next chapter, where she wakes up after her journey. It would cause mystery as to how she survived, and, more importantly, it would save us all of this sleeping.

Curse count in the chapter: 0

Book curse count: 56.

I also think we should start keeping an OGY, or Oh God Why count, for the weird moments in the book. I think the moment where Alan is killed is an OGY one because of the whole spike groin and“obscene intimacy”. In the last chapter, the alien being a creep is definitely an OGY, and the whole “Soft Blade” thing is a third OGY.

OGY count: 3

Feel free to add more if you think I missed any.

Next is Awakening with Snarkbotanya.

Comments

[edward9]

Kira remembered a description her fourth-year physics teacher had once used: “Going faster than light is like traveling in a straight line along a right angle.” The phrase had stuck with her, and the more she’d learned of the math, the more she’d realized how accurate it was.Why the heck is a xenobiologist learning advanced physics? And of course the xenobiologist who couldn’t calculate how long the ration packs would last her has a physics degree.

I completely agree. Why is a microbiologist/xenobiologists getting a degree in physics? If she made it into fourth year physics why can't she calculate ration packs in her head?

“Going faster than light is like traveling in a straight line along a right angle.”

What physics is this? Since the speed of light is a hard limit in Einstein's physics it is some other physics if the teacher is talking about what happens going faster than the speed of light.

My ballistics knowledge is limited to how objects travel within an atmosphere and it is all curves. Obnoxious curves. Wait, I just remembered something...

Runs upstairs and grabs ballistics textbook...

That's right. Those lucky guys that get to move stuff in vacuum and don't have to deal with air resistance use the same preliminary formulas. Concerning ballistics including objects in a vacuum ballisticians are still dealing with curves.

I also vaguely remember something about Einstein describing gravity as a bending of the of space time.

Long story short trajectory in space deals in curves not straight lines. In most cases I would imagine very slight curves but over long distances (like light years) very slight variations add up to huge differences.

Kira decides to give the alien a name, because it saved her. She does acknowledge that she wouldn’t have been in danger without it, but she still feels “gratitude and confidence.” Because nothing makes you confident like having a crazy death-suit attached to your body!Kira tries to name the suit Obsidian

A crazy death-suit attached to your body that draws killer aliens no less.

If she tries to name the suit Obsidian the suit must be black like a certain well known symbiote? Also Paolini's rock fetish has made another appearance.

[ultimate_cheetah]

*Runs upstairs and grabs ballistics textbook...

That's right. Those lucky guys that get to move stuff in vacuum and don't have to deal with air resistance use the same preliminary formulas. Concerning ballistics including objects in a vacuum ballisticians are still dealing with curves.*

Why do you have a ballistics textbook? Also, that's pretty interesting.

A crazy death-suit attached to your body that draws killer aliens no less.

I feel very reassured now!

If she tries to name the suit Obsidian the suit must be black like a certain well known symbiote? Also Paolini's rock fetish has made another appearance.

The ripoff is even more blatant. Many of Paolini's fetishes have made an appearance.

[edward9]

Why do you have a ballistics textbook? Also, that's pretty interesting.

The short answer is doing research for a book I am writing.

Yeah, I thought it was pretty interesting too. I never really thought much about space travel but I remembered the book also covered trajectory in vacuum so I took a look.

[torylltales]

Maybe Paolini meant fourth year as in fourth grade? As in, 9 to 10 year old students? Subtly implying that knowledge has progressed so far that young kids are taught basic physics in school.

But maybe that's giving him too much credit. After all, nothing else about civilisation seems to have progressed in the intervening 250 years.

[ultimate_cheetah]

But maybe that's giving him too much credit. After all, nothing else about civilisation seems to have progressed in the intervening 250 years.

He would've probably said 4th grade, based on his other Americanisms. (They're old Americanisms, right? I'm American and have never heard anyone say "most anyone" or "needs must".) Also, considering people still get down on one knee and give rings, and use sexist nomenclatures, I'm guessing school is still taught with sit-down desks, and standardized testing is still a thing.

[anontu]

That'd be worth asking him in an AMA.

[(Anonymous)]

In any case, this is commonplace in most books in the future, so it's not like he came up with it himself. I can easily believe she learned this stuff in 4th grade. Combine it with the fact that everybody always has a calculator on them, and there wouldn't be any problems. The most unbelievable thing about the whole thing is public education getting with the times and acknowledging the implants.

[edward9]

Maybe Paolini meant fourth year as in fourth grade?

In support of your theory Paolini's understanding of science from what others have said here seems to be about the level of a 4th grader.

I am sure Paolini heard that "faster than light travel is like traveling at a right angle..." from someone he considers smart. He should have left the line out or (I can't believe I'm saying this) explained it. I am no expert on space but the little I know about relativity points to curves in its fabric and the speed of light as a hard upper limit. Just throwing that line in tells me nothing about the alternate science he is using and contradicts what I do know.

He is raising an unanswered question which is a poor writing technique for something that contradicts the basic understanding and then implying if the reader were as smart as him it would be obvious.

[minionnumber2]

It's weird that she decided to settle on feces and disregard any other options. Having a leading hypothesis is natural, but she's not leaving room to consider if that dust is anything else, such as spores or something that will be toxic to anyone who isn't encased in Red Rocket.

[ultimate_cheetah]

You're right. How does she know that the dust won't settle on the skin of others, burrowing in and creating new aliens?

[epistler]

Because she's an arrogant twit with the Sue power of automatically knowing what the author knows, probably.

[epistler]

Listening to classical music in space. Real original, Chris.

It was a complex name, composed of and embodied by a web of interrelated concepts that she realized would probably take her years to fully parse, if ever. ...whoever named the alien “possessed a sense of elegance and poetry”

Please pat yourself on the back a bit more, Chris. GOD this is pretentious. And obnoxious. It's obnoxiously pretentious.

The Soft Blade.

And the pretentiousness is made even funnier when you find out that this is what it was building up to. Why oh why oh why was this not stopped by an editor?? HE NAMED THE "COOL" ALIEN SUIT PENIS. What was he thinking?

[ultimate_cheetah]

Please pat yourself on the back a bit more, Chris. GOD this is pretentious. And obnoxious. It's obnoxiously pretentious.

UltimateCheetah looked over her comment, the epitome of refined elegance. She surveyed the complex web of prose and snark, amazed at her skill. Then she hit send.

And the pretentiousness is made even funnier when you find out that this is what it was building up to. Why oh why oh why was this not stopped by an editor?? HE NAMED THE "COOL" ALIEN SUIT PENIS. What was he thinking?

That editor was probably on her fourth wine bottle then. I don't think Paolini, King of Innuendo and Ho Yay ever thinks about what he writes. (Hmm, Ho Yay and naming the suit the Soft Blade. Seems to be a trend here.)

[epistler]

That editor was probably on her fourth wine bottle then. I don't think Paolini, King of Innuendo and Ho Yay ever thinks about what he writes.

Lack of thought seems to be at least half his problem, really.

[torylltales]

A point about her listening to Bach:

How many of you spent time listening to 16th Century music? Like this Venetian lute arrangement?

Because that's the equivalent here. Bach died approximately 270 years ago (for us in 2020). But To Sleep is set in the year 2257, which is 507 years after Bach died.

1. Was there no music at all in the 250 years between now and To Sleep? No popular performers or new genres?

2. Is it really reasonable to expect any random ship in deep space to have immediate access to the entire catalogue of human music going back more than 500 years, just in case the passenger might want to listen to 500-year-old piano compositions? Or does Paolini think all the ships in other star systems are all connected to The Internet, because interstellar data is apparently now near-instant and has a reliable connection for uploading and downloading?

3. Not really a specific criticism, more of an idea I had that would have been cool. Kiras lives in a society where people commonly have nanotechnology supercomputers embedded in their brains to feed them visual and other sensory information directly, right? Why, in such a society, would music be constrained to the purely auditory? With a neural link directly to your brain, artists could create all sorts of multi-sensory experiences. Psy-trance that actually induces a trace state. Dance music that activates your knee-jerk response in time to the beat. Space-metal riffs that smell like rocket fuel. Boy band (or the futuristic equivalent) pop music that tastes sweet. Love songs that feel like a warm hug and smell like freshly baked bread. Futurama-style "holophone" music that presents you with a fully immersive VR theatrical performance.

I know that Kira's neural embeds were destroyed by Limpy, but I think it shouldn't even occur to her to "listen" to audio-only music. "Listen? Like, with my ears?" If there's nothing to watch on TV, we don't generally pull out the grammophone and vinyl records (Unless we are hopelessly pretentious hipsters). The very concept of music being single-sensation, audio-only artworks should be so obsolete that the ship computers aren't even loaded with music files.

[torylltales]

Another point: I don't mind Bach, and I'm not trying to be snobbish, but this feels like Paolini just threw Bach in as the first classical composer he thought of. Ask any person on the street about classical music, they'll probably mention Bach, or Mozart. Possibly Beethoven if they watched the dog movie in the 90s. If Paolini wanted to show off how cultured and sophisticated Kira and by extension he is, he could have dug a little deeper than the first name most people would think of.

Unrelated to that point, I'm partial to Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky, personally. Vivaldi only when I'm in the right mood.

[ultimate_cheetah]

With a neural link directly to your brain, artists could create all sorts of multi-sensory experiences. Psy-trance that actually induces a trace state. Dance music that activates your knee-jerk response in time to the beat. Space-metal riffs that smell like rocket fuel. Boy band (or the futuristic equivalent) pop music that tastes sweet. Love songs that feel like a warm hug and smell like freshly baked bread. Futurama-style "holophone" music that presents you with a fully immersive VR theatrical performance.

These are very good ideas. There could even be smell songs where a "song" is mostly carried by different smells. Or, since so many people don't live on earth anymore, music could be sounds specific to earth, like hornet buzzing, or birds calling. I can imagine rock music just made of barking dogs.

Was there no music at all in the 250 years between now and To Sleep? No popular performers or new genres?

I was going to make that point in the spork, but I forgot. You're right, though. Is there not a To Sleep Beyonce? Any colonist band groups? Any Sol band groups, or solo singers? A trend of mixing old and new music together?

Another point: I don't mind Bach, and I'm not trying to be snobbish, but this feels like Paolini just threw Bach in as the first classical composer he thought of.

Her reasoning doesn't even make sense. You don't think of how "mathematical" music is, you think of how it makes you feel.

How many of you spent time listening to 16th Century music? Like this Venetian lute arrangement?

I do that on rare occasion.

Unrelated to that point, I'm partial to Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky, personally. Vivaldi only when I'm in the right mood.

I personally like Chopin the best, because I have a music book of his songs that I like to play on the piano.

[anontu]

Good observation about the inconsistencies with tech implants yet listing to music only via external sound waves.

[hidden_urchin]

I think it's a Trek-ism. All of the Trek protagonists listen to what we would consider Western Classical music. It's like how they reference the canon of dead literary white guys all of the time.

[edward9]

Unrelated to that point, I'm partial to Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky, personally. Vivaldi only when I'm in the right mood.

Tchaikovsky is my favorite and I sometimes like Vivaldi. I will have to check out Rachmaninov.

At least he does not have her listening to Wagner for which I am grateful.

[cmdrnemo]

Kira is looking at herself in the “Markov bubble”, which is basically a bubble that insulates the ship from the superluminal universe. I don’t know why the bubble would be reflective, and I don’t know how the Markov drive could transport matter. However, I won’t pretend to know the science. Hopefully someone more qualified than me can explain it in the comments.

There's a bit of a problem with critiquing the science in this book. Namely: there isn't any. This is on the scale between comic book and space opera. The realism here is very much below the average set by Stargate SG1, which was the U.S. Air Force vs. the space mummies in space and ran that premise straight into extra-galactic vampires fighting rampaging killbots.

This is not up to the level of realism seen in Guardians of the Galaxy. Which manages to not understand what a galaxy or a guardian is.

At this level FTL travel is known for having weird nonsensical quirks. For example: In star trek, which is regarded as a much harder and better explained level of science fiction, we often see little lights stretching out and flying by the ship. Then when it drops out of warp those lights become stars. Except warp drive isn't fast enough for stars to do this. Hyperspace drive in Star Wars isn't even fast enough for that. They would need to be going Superman or Anime fast to make stars whip by like that. And at that speed the doppler shifts would be crazy extreme. Which would be pretty cool looking really. Everything in front would be blue shifted into the ultraviolet, and everything behind would be redshifted to microwaves. At that speed light itself is broken.

Basically, at this point it doesn't matter any more. Why does it have a mirror finish? Because it's a bubble and bubbles are reflective. How does a Markov drive work? Miniature giant space hamsters running in cages hooked up to little fans blowing on a mixture of dish soap and phlebotinum. That creates a bubble and the bubble moves on superluminal dark matter winds.

[epistler]

There's a bit of a problem with critiquing the science in this book. Namely: there isn't any. This is on the scale between comic book and space opera.

Remember when he bragged about his "year of research" and how scientifically accurate this thing was going to be? Yeaaaah. I don't even want to know how much of a trainwreck the "science" appendix at the end will turn out to be (I haven't been able to bring myself to look at it so far).

[(Anonymous)]

The Inheritance Cycle also took place in a year. Pretty sure that year’s worth of research was just watching various Star Trek, Fire Fly, and movies to lift their various Sci-fi techbabble.
“Plot-speed 2! Steady as she goes! Ready turbo lasers 6-9! Fire!”

[torylltales]

Miniature giant space hamsters

Boo! :D

There's a portion of a fake scientific paper in the back of the book trying to explain how Markov bubbles work. It's really bad.

[epistler]

Like who even fucking cares anyway?