MG's To Sleep in a Sea of Stars Thoughts

[masterghandalf]

So, after having previously read some extracts and gone through the sporks on here a couple of times, I finally was able to sit down and read through To Sleep in a Sea of Stars in its entirety for the first time! My conclusion… it’s not the worst thing I’ve ever read (then again, with some of the stuff I’ve been sporking lately, the bar for that is very low) but it’s sure as hell not good either. I thought I’d write up some of my thoughts about the whole thing; this isn’t supposed to be a detailed review, just a sort of checklist of some of the things going through my mind as I was reading.



• Kira is a pretty boring protagonist. While we get some stuff about her career, her family, her relationship with Alan and so on, most of the time she still feels like a pretty blank slate with her role in the story driven more by the Soft Blade than who she is. I read a review that compared her to the sort of RPG protagonist who’s given a few character traits of their own but is otherwise mostly supposed to be defined by the player, and I can definitely see where that’s coming from. Also, “Kira” and variations thereof have long been a name I’m fond of (something I often name my own PCs, come to think…) so having Paolini use the same name bugs me.

• We get a bunch of things (an early scene of wearing a party dress, focusing heavily on her boyfriend and angsting about having to choose between her career and a relationship, going out of her way to worry about her appearance, some uncomfortable bits about her physical anatomy and how the alien interacts with it) that feel less like actual character traits of Kira’s that flow naturally, and more a checklist of things Paolini wanted to hit to make sure we know our protagonist is a girl. It just feels weirdly artificial in ways I can't quite put my finger on.

• Kira’s coworkers are as obvious a bunch of sacrificial lambs as ever there were, and Alan in particular has such obvious death signs hanging over him it’s hard to care when it happens.

• The Soft Blade is supposedly alive and intelligent, but it feels more like a McGuffin than a character. At least the Venom Symbiote, in most versions, has personality.

• Also, after all the penis jokes in the sporking, I can’t take the name “Soft Blade” seriously ever again. Eventually it starts getting called the Seed instead. That… doesn’t help.

• Captain Falconi never stops feeling like one standard Han Solo clone straight from central casting. He makes a bad impression to begin with when we see him overcharging refugees to literally carry them to safety (do we ever get an explanation for that, or did I just miss it?) and IMO never really grows past it. Not helping is that his surname just makes me think of a certain Gotham City mafia boss.

• The rest of the Wallfish’s crew feel like they get maybe one or two personality traits each, and if they’re lucky a scene where they get to talk about their backstory with Kira. Otherwise, I found them pretty forgettable, which is a real problem when it feels like the book is trying to go for a found family angle it can’t manage.

• I can think of a whole host of reasons why a pig probably is not a good pet to have on a starship. Also, while the narration indicates the pig is supposed to be an adult pig, the actual descriptions of how people interact with it make me think Paolini may have been picturing a piglet instead.

• Ship minds as a concept bug me. The book never really justifies why we need giant superbrains to run starships when we have both AIs and human crew, and I find the idea of a brain being extracted from a body and stuck inside a starship potentially forever to be pretty claustrophobia-inducing. It might make more sense if this was a society with strong taboos against AI or advanced computers, a la Dune (and honestly, I could see Dune’s Tleilaxu creating something like ship-minds) but as it is, they just feel kind of weird and out-of-place.

• Speaking of, there are some very uncomfortable undertones with Gregorovitch about where people assume he’s potentially dangerous because he’s “crazy” (honestly, most of his behavior just comes across as the sort of stream-of-consciousness faux-quirky that makes me think of someone with a flair for the dramatic and fondness for trolling people – annoying, certainly, and not really mental illness) which ends up coming true when he melts down partway through the book and has to be shut down, even though he does come back later.

• The Entropists are a potentially interesting concept (and remind me a bit of the Technomages from Babylon 5) but they’re underdeveloped and add very little to the plot, and the way they volley their dialogue off each other gets really old, real fast.

• Why is Angela there. Seriously, why?

• The setting overall is boring. It feels like Paolini was going for something partway between The Expanse and, say, Mass Effect, Babylon 5 or Star Trek but the result just feels lifeless. We’ve got various human governments, colony planets, mega corps and such, but they’re all in the background and don’t get fleshed out, and no intelligent aliens until we meet some during the book itself. The internal human politics with the League and such is so poorly sketched out, it’s hard to have any investment in it, too.

• Not helping is that we spend almost the entire book aboard various ships, so we don’t even get much in the way of cool alien environments.

• I genuinely don’t know why Paolini decided to have the book’s overall conflict, the three-way war between humans, Wranaui and Nightmares, and have it all in the background, with our protagonists mostly finding out about it from news reports and such. That makes it really hard to care about the conflict or feel like it has any urgency, even though our protagonist’s whole mission is about stopping the war. I think Paolini may have been going for something like LotR, where our protagonist is someone largely overlooked by the powers-that-be who nonetheless ends up playing the crucial role in resolving everything, but Tolkien at least knew to put other POV characters in places where we could actually follow the overall war unfolding. Paolini doesn’t, and I couldn’t even bring myself to care when Earth got attacked, because I don’t know this version of Earth!

• For that matter, I don’t usually care for including both FTL and cryo, but I think this book does it particularly badly because Kira can’t even go into cryo for most of it, so we have long stretches of space travel where our protagonist is the only one awake, with nothing to do and no one to interact with, which Paolini insists on showing and which kills what momentum we had dead.

• Kira’s POV in general is restrictive. This is a big story with the fate of multiple species hanging in the balance, but when we stick so rigidly to the POV of one person who is incommunicado for long stretches, it doesn’t feel that way.

• We spend a good chunk of the middle of the book looking for an artifact that turns out to be broken and useless, and therefore a giant waste of everyone’s time.

• The overall conflict involving humanity caught in a war between two alien races has merit but doesn’t really work out (not helping is that Ctein’s Wranaui are an alien species bent on the destruction of humanity, led by an eldritch abomination… and so are the Nightmares, of a slightly different flavor, so the two sides don’t feel massively differentiated in their role in the conflict). The idea that this is literally humanity’s first contact with other sapient species… ends up not really mattering much, weirdly.

• The Wranaui, like the Ra’zac, feel like they could have been interesting if written by someone other than Paolini. Unfortunately, as written they feel both too alien and not alien enough – jellyfish creatures aren’t the easiest for humans to feel a connection to, but once Kira starts communicating with them, they mostly sound like humans when they “talk”, with added aquatic metaphors and announcing their names at the beginning of each new statement. We get some hints at more “alien-ness” with things like their forms and their sense of identity, but it’s never really explored in much detail. EDIT: And I know it's supposed to be short for "jellyfish," calling your powerful alien race "jellies" just makes me think of something I put on bread with peanut butter to make a sandwich; not intimidating.

• Ctein is one of the book’s big bads but is basically a generic dictator who happens to be a big jellyfish and ends up just as a big monster for Kira to fight. Not helping is that Paolini still has a problem with building up his villains with proper off-page presence (it still boggles my mind to think of how little presence Durza really has in Eragon despite being ostensibly the main antagonist of the first book).

• The Maw and the Nightmares are one acme horde of biological horrors dedicated to consuming everything in their path, a la the Zerg or Tyranids. Paolini tries to give them a bit of depth with the revelation of how they were created, but they still can’t help feel more like a swarm of locusts than a tortured creature lashing out in pain (and honestly, some of their eldritch horror aspect gets diminished when it turns out Kira accidentally created them and they were almost literally born yesterday, instead of being an ancient evil as originally implied… the narmy choice to have them speak cliched villain lines in English doesn’t help).

• The Maw is the other big bad and, like Ctein, has the problem of not having much presence over the course of the book. Together with the previous issue of the Nightmares’ origin and motivation being underwhelming, it makes Kira’s ultimate victory over them feel like it wasn’t really built up as it should have been.

• It feels like Paolini was going for something like a sort of 2001-esque transcendence with the ending. I don’t think he pulls it off.

• The revelation that the Maw cloned itself seven times, and the Seeker is still out there, are extremely blatant sequel hooks that, of course, still haven’t been followed up on.

• The fact that the precursor species literally called themselves “The Old Ones” or “Those Who Came Before” just gives me very unpleasant Newcomb flashbacks.

• The awe with which everyone talks about Crichton and finding the Beacon is a bit rich in light of Fractal Noise and what a pile of nothing that book was.

• When Kira and Falconi had sex, does that mean the Soft Blade was made an unwilling participant in a threesome? Yeesh.

• Ultimately, this book, like a lot of Paolini’s stuff, just felt like it was filled with discount knockoffs of things I’ve seen done better by other writers. It also just made me want to play Mass Effect again, which feels like it would be a much better use of my time.

Comments

[minionnumber2]

Honestly, I put To Sleep as the worst book Paolini has ever written because I never actually finished it. The most important part of a book, above all else, is the need to make you want to read more for various reasons. A mystery, a cool conflict, an intriguing world, a fun set of characters. None of these were present. As you mentioned, any neat idea present was actually handed how it was supposed to be handled in other books and series and completely misused here on all accounts. A shipmind would be an interesting parallel to an abusive corporation dehumanizing people and gaslighting human reactions by calling them "crazy". Falconi could have been presented as a rogue with a heart of gold if we found out the refugees were an act and they were secretly smuggling in something behind the scenes. Like everything Paolini's ever made, there's a mission gallons of untapped potential to every ounce of payoff.

[torylltales]

I think To Sleep is marginally better than Fractal Noise, because it had a larger cast of characters, more diverse locations, an actual plot, rising tension when he remembered that the plot was supposed to be happening, vague hints at interesting worldbuilding, and it was more "whee, space adventures!" in a similar way that Eragon was my favourite of the Inheritance books because it had that element of fun and exploration.

Yes, there were long stretches of nothing and the characters were mostly unlikeable, but that's in comparison to an entire book of nothing with characters who are wholly unlikeable.

To Sleep has the framework for a half decent space opera, with some serious trimming and development. Fractal Noise was never meant to be more than a short story.

[ultimate_cheetah]

I disagree. To Sleep was much larger and had more filler than Fractal Noise, and was much more disjointed. Additionally, it had one of the worst depictions on mental illness that I've seen in Greg, which makes it go to the bottom in my book.

[torylltales]

Remove the filler and To Sleep still had more actual story than Fractal Noise.

Not going to argue about Greg, because I agree. Alec's depression wasn't great, but it was more realistic and less harmful to people with actual mental illness than Greg.

[ultimate_cheetah]

Remove the filler and To Sleep still had more actual story than Fractal Noise.

I think Fractal Noise has a consistent throughline and goal that works in its favor, while in To Sleep, the story changes from Kira travelling with the Wallfish and watching a war between Jellies and humans to Kira getting a pointless artifact, to Kira working with some Jellies and Tschetter to stop the boss, which leads to a climax fight, and then a more ridiculous climax fight with an absolutely bonkers ending. With Fractal Noise, the conclusion is led up to and feels connected to the rest of the story.

Not going to argue about Greg, because I agree. Alec's depression wasn't great, but it was more realistic and less harmful to people with actual mental illness than Greg.

I was REALLY upset about Greg, as you could probably see from the spork I did.

[minionnumber2]

For me, I didn't find anyone in To Sleep any more likable than anyone in Fractal Noise or find any of the concepts interesting enough to stick around. And I couldn't even get on the space adventure angle because Soft Blade is such an overpowered piece of equipment there's no tension in anything that's going on with Kira and we don't know enough about the rest of the galaxy to care if the Sith blow up Taris. Even if you cut out the filler, I don't think the set up stands.

Not to say that Fractal was much better, but at least it was humans in a (stupid, pointless) dangerous situation over a Superman.

[ultimate_cheetah]

I agree with you. There was danger that the crew in Fractal Noise faced, and two out of the four main characters did die. And I liked the one desolate planet setting rather than the To Sleep setting, where we mostly saw spaceships.

[epistler]

The Limp Dick didn't even really need to be there. All it does is make life more convenient for the Sue while conferring unearned importance on her.

[epistler]

Not helping is that his surname just makes me think of a certain Gotham City mafia boss.

"Don't ignore the fact that clearly Falconi's got people in your office, Dent!"

I can think of a whole host of reasons why a pig probably is not a good pet to have on a starship.

Neither pet even needed to be in the book to begin with.

I think Paolini may have been going for something like LotR, where our protagonist is someone largely overlooked by the powers-that-be who nonetheless ends up playing the crucial role in resolving everything,

The important difference here of course is that Frodo did not have any superpowers.

[masterghandalf]

Neither pet even needed to be in the book to begin with.


And they both just sort of vanish partway through except for a few offhand mentions, to boot (which honestly just makes me think of Embers, since something that really jumped out at me on my recent read/commentary of that fic was that it introduces tons of characters and then a lot of them just end up disappearing from the narrative without their arcs being resolved at all, or get demoted to recurring background characters at best).

The important difference here of course is that Frodo did not have any superpowers.


I mean, he had the Ring - but that comes with a whole laundry list of reasons why using it was a bad idea;). I was thinking less in terms of comparing the characters themselves and more in comparing the narrative perspective, admittedly.

[epistler]

And they both just sort of vanish partway through except for a few offhand mentions, to boot

When I gave one of my characters a pet dog the very good boy wasn't just there as set dressing; he actually played a role in the plot by leading police to his owner when he was in danger (dog got left behind, cop recognised the dog from a previous encounter and followed him). Later on he alerted everyone to a fire which helped them get out of the building in time. Such a good boy! I hope he got a new chew toy. ^_^

something that really jumped out at me on my recent read/commentary of that fic was that it introduces tons of characters and then a lot of them just end up disappearing from the narrative without their arcs being resolved at all, or get demoted to recurring background characters at best

Same with this book, you will have noticed. Like why even bother to have some of Kiragon's original colleagues survive if they never come back into the story? Or those others who go into cryo after she blows up the Extenuating Circumstances or whatever it was called? You can't just treat characters like set dressing; it's sloppy and insulting.

I mean, he had the Ring - but that comes with a whole laundry list of reasons why using it was a bad idea;). I was thinking less in terms of comparing the characters themselves and more in comparing the narrative perspective, admittedly.

Fair enough, but you can see how using that perspective doesn't fit when the protagonist is the biggest badass in the story rather than a hapless country boy who can barely hold a sword and has serious mental health issues thanks to carrying a cursed ring around with him.

[ultimate_cheetah]

Neither pet even needed to be in the book to begin with.

I used to give characters random pet small dogs that had no place in the story - when I was 14.

[epistler]

In a different book I gave a character a dog and after she is killed her mother takes the dog in. It's plot relevant because later on someone sees the dog and goes hey I've seen that dog before it belonged to so and so, how do you know her? Which leads to her being busted as the character's mother whom they have a grudge against. Plot relevant pupper.