To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini: A long review for a gratuitously long book.
Spoiler alert! Not much to spoil.
Let me apologize in advance. Christopher Paolini deserves respect for his imagination, ambition, and intellect in creating a detailed fictional world, and to have written a few good scenes in 800-plus pages. But this book seems ripe for a spirited response.
If I had read Paolini’s YA novels, the Edergon series, which apparently made him a teenage “publishing phenomenon” with 40 million copies sold, perhaps I could fathom the distress fans must have, or should have felt, with this, his “first adult novel.”
Cleary, my bad review won’t affect his success. I’m merely stating my feelings and have absolutely no literary clout. Maybe I’m just cynical or bitter. But after reading To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, including appendices and afterwards and lists, all 878 pages, you would have to slather me in peanut butter and throw me to the Jellies before I’d again consider reading anything by Paolini.
Mentioning his family may seem pretty low, but Paolini does it himself, telling us his sister and his mom are editors. Unfortunately, he gave them an impossible task. “So much editing!” Somehow I feel the need to apologize to them also. I can’t imagine what Star Sleep was like before the editing.
Blame should also go to the well-respected publisher, Tor, doing what all publishers presumably do, capitalizing on early success, embracing the huge word count because people think they are getting more for their money when a book is thick.
So why then did I bother to slog through Star Sleep? Near the beginning, I was excited just enough to hope for more, so I kept going. Also, ever since I got a one-star rating for a novel in which the reader “didn’t read much of this book,” I vowed never to review a book I hadn’t read all the way through.
Are there other crass personal reasons for this review?Of course there are. I am in no way jealous of his writing; but I am jealous of his publishing success. What writer wouldn’t be? In my case, I wrote a satire, disguised as sci-fi (Roobala Take Me Home) around 1978, and exchanged letters with Scribners in 1980 in which they praised the writing. After about 20 rewrites or so, it remains light on the science and heavy on the satire. Simply put, my book is better. (Of course, if you read this review, you’ll realize the comparison isn’t much to brag about.)
Many writers suffer from the “I can write better than that” syndrome. But my own failures aside there are objective standards, are there not? In this age of subjectivity and self-publishing, do we even have literary standards? If we do, then something like To Sleep in a Sea of Stars needs to be called out.
In his afterward and acknowledgements Paolini provides readers a self-conscious confession, a need for us to feel for him because of the difficulty in writing Star Sleep. He clings to the belief that the best he could do is somehow good enough. But it’s time for him to admit failure, move on, and become a better writer. His earlier success bloated his ego. So by way of twisted rationalization, if he ever reads this, which is extremely doubtful, I might be doing him a favor.
Paolini admits, “I won’t lie” (does anyone trust someone who says no lie?) that he’d been “a bit cocky” writing Star Sleep. It’s understandable. His sort of immense success at such a young age could easily make anyone believe every word they arrange on a page is pure genius.
The Plot
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars reads like a bad sci-fi movie filled with tropes and clichés, no original ideas, with hours of pointless action scenes, the kind of film where you could excuse yourself to use the restroom without pausing it and not have missed anything important.
Kira is a xenobiologist, someone who studies and manipulates unfamiliar biology not found in nature. She lives and works on a colony and gets proposed to by her guy, Alan, in scenes worthy of Hallmark. The familiarity of these competently written scenes makes for an easy read. It’s weirdly gratifying that in a couple hundred years space colonies are as sappy as early twenty-first century Earth.
Kira the xenobiologist goes on one more foray before they are to take off on their new life together. She goes alone of course, then finds a strange wreck, falls into it, and get covered by something which she refers to as simply the xeno, and later calls it the “xeno suit,” “Soft Blade,” and “Seed.” Reading about her falling in and getting covered up by the strange alien substance is enjoyable, enough to make readers turn the page.
This xeno-suit Soft-Blade covers Kira’s body, except apparently for her face, although it gives her facial protection later from time to time, sort of like a protective visor, convenient for getting through sticky situations meant to be exciting action. However, the xeno Soft Blade accidentally kills her finance Alan, and a few others, and she blames herself for not being able to control the alien substance. While it has very little, if anything, to do with the plot, Kira finds out she’s no longer on her futuristic birth control. Thematically, it could be argued that it’s significant, but it’s a stretch. Mostly, it becomes just a tidbit like so many others dropped into an endless sea of useless words.
We have a relatively interesting sequence of scenes on a ship called the Extenuating Circumstances, as members of the UMC, United Military Command, Carr and Tschetter try to get the xeno Soft Blade off Kira. Both characters somehow become sort of relevant later, long after we’ve forgotten about them. Apparently, there are many divisions of the UMC, Marines, Army, Navy Intelligence, but not much purpose in separating them. The ship is attacked by aliens called “Jellies.” Kira battles one “Jelly.” A piece of the xeno gets torn off and along with pieces of the Jelly and a human combine to form a new alien creature.
Kira has many confusing mixed up dreams about these new creatures, simply referred to as the “nightmares.” The reference itself is odd because Paolini names everything and everyone, bits and pieces of spaceships, weapons, travel methods, and more, including the pig on page 706, but somehow fails up come up with a proper name for “nightmares.”
The nightmares kill everything in sight. Kira, who likes to feel guilty and responsible for stuff that happens in the nonstop sequence of nonsensical action, blames herself for the creation of the nightmares, just as she blames herself for killing her fiancé. She gets away on a ship called the Valkyrie, and we get to know the crew over many pages; especially notable is Orso, who on page 125 tells Kira that if she needs to stay alive, she should eat his arms and legs while he’s asleep in the cryo pod. Seems pretty significant, but he and the Valkyrie fade away around page 149 never to be heard from again.
Apparently, the Valkyrie becomes an afterthought so we can get to know the characters we should really care about, Captain Falconi and the others aboard the Wallfish, a pirate-like, renegade sort of ship and crew. Over hundreds of pages Kira becomes close to them, although the closeness is never felt by this reader, just lots of clichéd action and dialogue that supposedly makes them a family of sorts.
Still encased in her soft blade, Kira, Falconi and the Wallfish crew fight the Jellies, the nightmares, the UMC humans, and a faction of the Jellies, while going on an action-packed journey to find the supposedly extremely important Staff of Blue, which turns out to be broken, and… that’s it for the Staff of Blue. Or should it be a Blue Shaft? It’s only mentioned maybe once or twice later as an aside. On this journey, the Wallfish joins forces with a Jelly named Itura from a Jelly faction called the Knot-of-Minds and they are chased back to Sol by the nightmares and the bad Jelly faction led by “the all-powerful Ctein” who also have a Seeker with them, another being who seems to be important at first but turns out to be not so much. Once they get to “Earth!” on about page 525, somehow it’s a big surprise that “Sol was a war zone.”
Kira, as she has been slowly doing over many pages, gains enough knowledge of her skin tight xeno-suit Soft-Blade to prepare for the conflict and around page 682, she is “about to attack the greatest jelly of them all.” (The flavor is never revealed: probably grape.) This great and mighty Ctein doesn’t have a lot of character traits, nothing to suggest an epic battle, other than being a really big Jelly.
Using the xeno Soft Blade, now called the Seed, Kira defeats the bad Jelly faction and the almighty Ctein. But then she has to fight a big ball of nightmare, now apparently called a “maw.” On page 778, she cleverly forgives the big bad Maw and by extension herself, a much needed relief from unnecessary guilt. She defeats it with a little help from a fleeting memory of her fiancé, Alan, whom we haven’t thought much about for hundreds and hundreds of pages, and from a Casaba-Howitzer. Kira creates a space station called Unity so that the good Jelly faction can get along with the humans, and peace can return to the galaxy.
Then we have several scenes where Kira, who now has become her own version of a mighty powerful God-like being, incongruously signs a power-of-attorney letter for her family whom we’ve never actually met, gives sentimental gifts to the crew of the Wallfish along with other unwarranted mawkish nonsense, and on page 819, “Kira smiled, for it was good.”
She then “remembers” there are seven other duplicate nightmares in the galaxy that only she can chase down and dispose of because she’s guilty and responsible for everything, but she needs a nap, so she “sleeps in a sea of stars.”
Point of View
The entire 800-plus page story is written from a young woman’s POV but reads more like the tale of a 12 year old boy. The exchanges between Kira and Gregorovich, the ship’s mind, are sprinkled with adolescent insults such as “meatbag.” Perhaps too cynically, I can imagine the author knowing that women read a lot more than men. So the only way to sell this book was to force it into a woman’s point of view.
Characters
We get lots of introductions to irrelevant characters. None have original thought or motive, or become anything more than a rip-off of every character ever created in a sci-fi novel or movie. Aside from the sometimes entertaining ship’s mind, and Orso offering for Kira to eat him, most of the many-many-many characters are useless and shallow. The Wallfish crew tells stories about each other that do little to enrich their personalities and are unrelated to the plot. Even the Entropists, who are supposed to be unique, are stereotypes.
Kira of course is the central character, struggling to control the alien xeno-suit-Soft-Blade-Seed, a one-note feeling of guilt dogging her. For the next 700 or so pages, Kira blames herself for her fiancé’s death and for the formation of the nightmares. The novel seems to hinge on these guilt scenes, but there is nothing remarkable about them, no sense of internal struggle to sort out if it’s really her or the Soft Blade to blame. Each is just one scene in a billion or so action scenes. Kira feels she is responsible for everything, so that by page 808, she is still blaming herself? (Or is she now congratulating herself?)
Weapons/Names
Paolini seems obsessed with naming everyone and everything regardless of significance. His galactic arsenal of assorted weaponry includes bullets, bazookas, blasters, grenade launchers, rifles, pistols, slug throwers, power armor, energy weapons, howitzers, casaba-howitzers, cruisers, battleships and much more, some to be studied in appendix III. While it seems like a shotgun approach, I don’t recall reading about any shotguns.
Paolini also gives us power tubes, giant pillbugs, dead pillbugs, Jellies, Graspers, Jelly ships, xeno, xeno suit, Soft Blade, Soft Blade suit, weight-lifting rooms, a brig, the Maw, Corrupted, The Vanished, Hightower, Highmost, Seekers, and more, including the term on page 725, “not-pain.”
Sometimes the names are too similar, as on page 695, the irrelevant Klein paired with big jelly Ctein. Or they change, the xeno becoming the Soft Blade, then the Seed, and on page 617 Gregorovich becomes Greg because we’re supposed to think of him as family now.
And there is the ubiquitous “chell,” which serves as nothing more than a prop, a stand in for coffee, on pages 366, 368, 379, 389, 635 and so on. Kira makes herself chell, drains it, wonders how many cups of chell she’s made, annoyed chell is cold but drinks it anyway, and unnecessarily calls it “heated chell.” Absolutely nothing seems to change after she drinks her chell. Not even an extra thought or two. She never has a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with her chell.
Nearly everything and everyone is given a proper name, except of course for the glaring exclusion of those pesky, unable-to-be-named “nightmares.”
The Science
In the addendums and self-conscious afterward, Paolini tells readers to pour a drink because “You must be tired,” and he admits (brags?) he didn’t go to college and he had to learn the “science.” It appears he did learn a lot of science on his own, but he seems incapable of making that science palatable for others. He is worn out trying and assumes readers must also be worn out. (Correctly, I think.)
Significant portions of Star Sleep read like a textbook (or those F-18 maintenance manuals I wrote as a Technical Data Engineer). The narrative has us continually measuring stuff. Apparently, we must all know the precise distance between people, creatures, doors, guns, ships, planets, and so on. We must study and understand a real or fictitious time, measured in hours, months, minutes, frenzied seconds and half seconds, and we must know all about FTL, the Markov Drive, and the Markov Limit. On page 843, a lecturer implores us to “study hard.”
If we’re going to study that much, shouldn’t it be for some clear purpose? What are we learning? Unfortunately, Paolini’s explanations make it difficult to know if he is making up complex concepts or merely communicating basic science in unnecessarily complex terms. I guess we just have to “do the math.”
Concepts seem based on real people; for example, Boltzman on page 611, but they are tossed around like thoughts in a washing machine. Oddly, Appendix III defines “blasters” but doesn’t include anything about Boltzman. And while yes fractals are fascinating, Paolini does a miserable job of explaining or showing their significance to his story.
Humor
While To Sleep in a Sea of Stars is utterly, absolutely, humorless, written with adolescent dramatic seriousness, it does try hard to be funny. On 387, 388, 539, 750, 808, and other pages, the attempts at humor taste like flat coke, Paolini straining to call attention to his own jokes “humorous though it was.” On page 591, Falconi chuckles with false humor. More chuckling on page 810 at “boiled spinach,” and on page 807, Falconi laughs at the line: “Life is never perfect.” Guess you had to be there.
What’s the purpose of Mr. Fuzzy pants and poop on page 536 other than little boys, or immature adults, liking the word poop? And what about the pig? It’s only purpose appears as a set up for the scene on page 707, where Gregorovich-Greg saves the pig. Apparently, this is supposed to be one of those satisfying and humorous moments we’ve seen many times in comic book movies.
The book does provide unintended humor with its Jellies and blasters and knot of minds and planet e and gee isn’t it fun. Bughunt! The following made me laugh out loud: On page 580, a Jelly “flies through the windshield” of a “car.” The page 749 reference to “suckers.” On page 545, “concisely,” because it seems like unintended self-depreciation. Paolini often uses about 20 words to accomplish what could be done in three. Page 773 explanation of a human-nightmare-jelly as “overgrown meat.” Somewhere a reference to a “rising gorge hub.” And on page 453, the reference to an oozing “hard brown substance.” Is this the Peanut Butter?
How can anyone read “Jelly” without wanting some peanut butter? This novel feels like a grape jelly sandwich on white bread. On page 659, “human-Jelly war.” The humans are the peanut butter! “Kill this jelly.” And Appendix I, page 829 “more serious studies.” LOL hilarious.
Sex/Sexism/Gender
Clearly, sexism permeated the traditionally male dominated genre of science fiction, especially in the 1950s. Telling this story from the POV of a woman doesn’t address any of the intricacies of sex and gender in 2021, but rather glosses over the stubbornly enduring bias and stereotypes about women.
The setting is hundreds of years from now in a civilization that has solved all sorts of biological problems, including equalizing any physical advantage males might have over females, yet we still getstereotypical female gender traits, on page 473, “less of a chance they’ll punch a woman,” on page 565, “voluptuous,” page 567, “boobs work.” The backup for the “ship’s mind” is a female not fit for the task, a pseudo-intelligence named “Morven” like a “maven,” a term often applied to fashion.
The sex and innuendo comes along as stiffly as the prose, a “truly deep unknown” but “as always, tech inspired” requiring “several hours of thrusting” into the “nether regions” as the Soft Blade “swells in size.” On page 688 Kira “forced the Soft Blade to retreat from her innermost parts.” On page 745, she withdraws the Soft Blade guiltily after gutting a few Jellies, their insides “soft and giving and quivering” and “intimate and obscene” making her feel “shame” like a “sinner.”
And apparently, the only reason for Kira’s concertina on page 645 is to facilitate sex between her and Falconi but she doesn’t “remember all the fingering.” Where is the Staff of Blue when you need it?
There are superficial references to pregnancy and motherhood. The Soft Blade becomes the Seed and Kira is the “mother of the corrupted” and so on. On page 731, the Seed is hurling through a shaft to kill Ctein. It’s hard to understand the hardness trying to understand the thrust of the motherhood-pregnancy angle.
The Writing
If you like lots of mediocre writing about repetitious action that doesn’t mean much, writing that doesn’t drive the narrative, change anything, or reveal character, you might like this novel.
Paolini’s vivid imagination exceeds his writing skills. He uses inadequate words to describe pointless action and mundane events with a seemingly amateurish urge to explain everything. To Sleep in a Sea of Stars is one of those books you keep flipping through wishing you were on page 500 instead of 380.
Of course, this could all be a result of “style,” but style can easily be used as an excuse for bad writing. Overall, it is uninspired, possibly suitable for textbooks and technical manuals. It is, to put it generously, not very good, which makes the exceptions seem brilliant, or at least worth noting; for example, the objectively excellent poem on page 783. Kira exploring the wreckage and being covered with the xeno are written well enough to pump this reader full of enthusiasm for what might come.
The cluttered prose has the occasional sharp poetic phrase that you suspect is purely accidental given the carelessness of the rest of it. Every now and then you read something that suggests the author’s got the hang of it, and almost cheer for him as if he were a limping marathoner determined to complete the race. But then you stumble on scenes so inane and dull you want to cry out as if you were running the race yourself and just broke your fibula. Or you have an urge to trip the author just to make him stop.
We get moderately well written conversations on pages 486, 512, 603-604, and 610-614. Other pages 621, 645, 678, 690, 708 offer some relatively clear prose. However, Paolini seems unaware that he’s describing his own writing when he writes, “words without end.”
Most of the dialogue is stilted, perhaps more suited for old TV shows. For example, “Roger that” and “Stand clear.” On page 381, “You’re crazy, you know that,” and on page 392, “Let’s do this.” When adding descriptors to the dialogue, Paolini has a habit of referring to characters he’s just named as “the man” or “the woman” or “the thickly built woman” or “the machine boss,” or the captain, the engineer, the kid. Readers are left to wonder if the man woman or boss is someone different than the person just named.
I suppose some readers might be impressed with descriptions such as on page 100, “a monster with many arms.” Or page 259, “Gore and viscera sprayed the floor.” On page 502, when “a line of ice poured down Kira’s spine.” Or page 733 “releasing a spray of arterial blood.” And page 739 a “storm front of fluids and mangled body parts.” On page 745, it’s “a massacre all her own doing.” Somewhere, Paolini writes a “babble of exclamations.”
Both relevant and irrelevant information is repeated. Repeatedly. On page 673, Kira asks numerous questions about her control over the Soft-Blade-xeno-suit-Seed when readers already are well aware of this superficially described struggle, and again on 731, “If only she’d used the soft blade better?”
Many sentences state the painfully obvious. For example on page 710, “The Wallfish didn’t blowup” and page 737, “She wasn’t dead.” We are also treated to many clichéd moments of supposed deep insight; for example on497, “Sentient life isn’t as rare as we thought,” and page 797, “Trust chance,” and page 789, “Life is sacred.”
Readers may overlook the frequent use of the “not-quite-right” word; for example “quail” on pages 746 and 779. Yes, the secondary definition of the word is a verb “to show fear or apprehension” but is this really the best descriptor? Most readers get an image of a bird.
On page 745, Kira questions if she should “allow graspers to kill her,” then immediately “grasped the door,” with no recognition of the possible pun or irony or metaphor. Why are things named as they are? Is the “Wallfish” like a fish on a wall? A talking bass? Occasionally, we get some admission of possible double meaning, “The creature looked like a nightmare, in both senses of the word.” And on page 660, in a reference to the xeno-suit, we stumble into a self-conscious pun, “better, ah, suited.” And maybe we are meant to think of the Maw as cancer on page 774. Is this a reference to the writer dealing with his or someone else’s cancer? (If so, I’m really sorry. As a survivor of a brutal, rare salivary gland cancer, I’ve stared into my own “maw,” although that’s not quite the right word.)
Paolini seems clueless about allusions, with “my pretties” as if from the wicked witch of the west, and “the Jelly, Itura,” who sounds like an Atari computer. On pages 472, 536, 588, “Captain, O Captain” my captain: Is it a reference to Walt Whitman or Dead Poet’s Society? On page 556 “power troopers.” Go, go power rangers. On page 600, a 2001 Space Odyssey rip-off. On page 623, echoes of Hamlet, “perchance to dream.” And on pages662 and 692, repeated references to “the great and mighty Ctein,” who must be a Jewish Wizard of Oz? On pages 786 and 787, the narrative becomes Yoda like with “limbs she felt…and large she grew.” But no matter, as stated on page 549, with a little help from Alfred Hitchcock and Doris Day, “What would be, would be.” Que Sera, Sera.
Kira is still blaming herself on page 790, issuing “a killing command” because “a cleansing was necessary.” Ethnic cleansing? She must “atone for her sin” and she makes a “sign of the cross.” Her guilt must mean she’s… Catholic?
Nothing in Kira’s character explains her feeling guilty and responsible for everything in the universe. The meandering and messy plot combined with the stereotypical characters and mediocre writing leaves the reader begging for “not-pain.”
At least I’ve apologized, and will do so again if needed. If you made it through this review, as Mr. Paolini says “You must be tired.”
