This artifact bonds with her and causes all sorts of trouble. She and her team are almost finished with a survey mission on a moon that is being considered for colonization, when she stumbles upon an alien artifact unexpectedly. Humans are able to travel through space and they’ve colonized different planets, but they have not yet had any contact with aliens. In the interview she mentioned that last part was an intentional attempt to make the Wranaui language sound more formal and she tried to make Kira sound more formal while she was using it, but that didn’t come across to me while listening, it just sounded like a different voice. When communicating in the Wranaui language, she spoke more like Itari.
During more intense/action/military type dialogue, Kira was voiced similarly to Sparrow which was significantly different from her normal voice. Even though we in real life have a variety of tones we use in different situations, during audiobooks I have trouble if the narrator varies that tone too much for a single character because I associate a specific speaking tone with a specific character. My one complaint was her somewhat inconsistent voicing of Kira. I was pretty impressed by that, because I would not have guessed, and what a long one to jump in with! I thought she voiced it in a way that fit the text, and she handled the large cast of characters really well with easily distinguishable voices. During an interview at the end of the audiobook, I learned this was her first audiobook. This was the longest audiobook I’ve ever listened to in my short audiobook listening career! At 32.5 hours long, it felt kind of like I was listening to an entire series as it was. Right now this is the only book, and it works well as a standalone, but my impression was that sequels, or at least other books in the same setting, are intended.
This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday. Otherwise, you may be briefly amused by the subtle references to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or Red Dwarf, but in the end, like the attempts at humor in this book, it all falls flat. If you like bland, uninspired sci-fi, you might also like this. If you liked his other books, you might like this. Then he claims to have made a breakthrough.
I'm reminded of that quote often attributed to Einstein: "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it." Paolini stated that all his friends and family were telling him as he wrote this book that it wasn't working. Such great effort that even simple ideas come off as needlessly complex. Like many men writing women, Kira comes off as more the parody or a fantasy of a woman than a woman herself.Īdditionally, Paolini takes great effort to explain the science that he researched in writing the book. In addition to being a slough of despondency to get through, the character of Kira is written with all the grace and sensitivity of somebody who lacks the grace and sensitivity to write believable female characters and is too afraid to ask anybody if she seems believable. The big bad ultimately deflates like a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade with a not-so-slow leak, and you never are given any reason to care about the characters in the book (and maybe sometimes find yourself rooting for the giant space squid, if only to make the story end sooner). She teams up with wave after wave of redshirts tracking down plot coupons and having pointless conversations that only act as filler before the next wave of cryosleep en route across the galaxy only to find out that most of the plot coupons have already expired. Kira is a xenobiologist who while xenobiologisting discovers an alien artifact that gives her an alien symbiote that, at first, kills everybody she cares about, but also basically makes her a space goddess, so she's able to get over that pretty quickly, only occasionally delving into survivor guilt when the narrative needs that trusty plot handbrake to keep from getting to the end faster. It's part Alien/Prometheus, part Venom (you know, the Spider-Man villain), part Witchblade, part StarCraft, and all Mary Sue. To Sleep in a Sea of Stars is a bland 800+ page story that, like Paolini's other novels, borrows heavily from things that came before. Almost 20 years later, the only thing that has changed is that now his characters swear. Overrated and underwhelming, To Sleep in a Sea of Stars shows that Eragon author Christopher Paolini has not matured as a writer since penning his way to a claim to fame at the age of 15.
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