Review: To Sleep in a Sea of Stars
Important notes below!
This is an old review that I wrote a year or so ago and didn't bother to publish it or really write much of value. I'm cleaning it up minimally and publishing it now because why not, I can do whatever I want.
There are major spoilers for the book below.
A book is the sum of its characters
The biggest problem with To Sleep in a Sea of Stars is that the characters. They have very few redeeming qualities. Their actions, motivations, and even sometimes their backgrounds somehow manage to be both confusing and cliche at the same time. Without any like-able and interesting characters, it is impossible to enjoy the book.
Let's start with the absolute worst of the worst. The character of Alan is hilarious. He is unashamedly a walking plot device. At no point did I give even the slightest bit of a fuck about Alan. At no point did I ever feel like Alan was going to live past the first chapter and, surprise! He doesn't. The relationship between Kira and Alan is cloyingly surface-level and the audience can feel how fake and constructed it is.
Falconi bored me to tears. I didn’t feel like he grew or changed at all. His sobbing backstory failed to make me empathize with him. I didn’t get a sense at all of what the author “wanted” me to think of him, or what I would have thought of him. He was just kind of there being uninteresting. (That counts for all the other 'Falconi' proxies, because every single tough-guy archetype in this novel sounds exactly like him. I don't know why the author thought ending every sentence with the last name of someone sounded tough, but man.)
Trig and Sparrow were both annoying characters who I really couldn’t care less about. From what Trig said and how he was voiced I would have assumed he was around 11 or 12. Then it is revealed halfway through that he is 20 years old. Damn! What an obnoxious way to write someone. 20-year-olds may not be real adults yet but they are not simpering puppies.
Audrey Nielsen is a good character but I felt she was horribly under utilized. It doesn't feel like she really impacts the plot.
I felt that Vishal and Song also had the potential to be good characters, but they didn't evolve or change much. Vishal saw a little growth in the way that he changed his relationship with the rest of the crew, which I appreciated. But Vishal and Song's identities were mostly centered around their ethnicity and culture in a way that felt very reductive. Song was Korean and gay and tough, and that was like 99% of her personality. The author felt the need to remind us literally every encounter with her that she is Korean and gay and tough. I wouldn't go so far as to call it racist or anything, but definitely reductive.
World Building
The one character that I was really holding out for was Gregorovitch. I started out really, really disliking him, but he eventually turned into one of the most unique characters in the book. I still think he was a little "over-written"; every interaction with Gregorovitch through the first half of the novel, we are needled with reminders of how SpooKy and ZaNY and quuiiirrkyy!! he is.
But overall, being a Shipmind is a pretty big deal and the existence of Shipminds was one of the more realistic and interesting features of the setting (if a little morally dubious). Genetic modification and wetware for use in space travel feels like a future that is mysterious and dramatic, but still possible for humans to reach. There was little else in the setting that felt truly unique. Wow, the aliens have tentacles and pilot ships that look utterly inhuman? Color me shocked.
Just an audio thing?
I listened to Stars on audiobook. There are many, many things that make voicing this audiobook very difficult. There are also many choices the production team made that resulted in an audiobook that was hard to listen to.
I really don't want to hate on the voice actor. I think a lot of her voice acting wasn't actually that bad. Sort of an "awful taste, but great execution" situation. The primary example is the voice of Sparrow. I personally found Sparrow's accent, attitude, and everything about her dialogue horrendously obnoxious. If the voice actor was going for a grating voice, then by God she nailed it. But it didn't make the character very enjoyable.
I think it is very hard for women to voice men, especially gruff-sounding men with deep voices like Falconi. I also think this is, partly, because I am a man, and female actors voicing men sounds particularly wrong to me. It sounds mocking, as if the female actor is putting on a kind of disrespectful falsetto. I think this is partially preference because I have heard female friends say the opposite - that men imitating women can sound annoying to their ears. Falconi perpetually sounded like a teenage boy pretending to be a rough-and-tumble macho man, and it seriously impacted my view of his character.
Whatever the cause, the final result is that the voice acting was overall unpleasant for the human characters.
Voicing the alien creatures in the novel was even more difficult. Because of how their language works, the aliens start every sentence with a declaration of who was speaking. I think in print this would have simply been an artifact of the fantasy setting that the reader learned to tune out and mentally skip over. But the repetitions in audio of "Kira here. Inarë here. Kira here. Inarë here." got old quick. You would think that two aliens alone in a room together only talking to each other would drop that linguistic quirk, or that the author would simply choose not to translate it when not necessary...
Random Notes
I did think it was interesting that (to date) that all of Paolini's fiction explores the themes of deep mental connections, both magical and mundane. In Inheritance, as the relationship between Eragon and Saphira grows and they become more powerful, the magical telepathic connection between them is used as an allegory for the deep affection born of their partnership. Paolini clearly used the same formula again and again in Stars (Kira and the Soft Blade, the Entropists, the creation of The Maw, etc.) and it was still effective, even though the characters were not as compelling to me. I wondered why this theme is personally so interesting to him.
Let's face it - the names "Staff of Blue", "The Soft Blade", and "The Maw" are all pretty damn lame. It wasn't a huge sticking point, though.
The body horror surrounding The Soft Blade wasn't bad at all. I would have liked for it to be explored a little more. I felt his huge disconnect between how little Kira appreciated TSB. It felt like even after she learned that TSB was not going to hurt her and was actively giving her the power to achieve their goals, she was still rather whiny about the whole thing. Kira saw the TSB as a violation of her free will and bodily autonomy; I think the possibility of her dying several times over at the hands of tyrannical enemies would be an even bigger violation of her freedoms, but that's just me... Maybe I too would freak out in her situation. The Shipminds, the depiction of torture in the novel, the nature of TSB and the aliens all pointed to some seriously gnarly body horror hidden just beneath the surface but it didn't manifest itself. (I am a huge fan of series like Bioshock and Tokyo Ghoul though, so maybe I'm an outlier.)
The bitter conclusion
Overall I was very disappointed with Stars as I remember really liking the Inheritance series as a child. Now I'm wondering if that was more the writing, or because I was a child.