What was it like? . . . It was like death, like the obliteration of the self. The walls around my mind fell away and left me to gibber senselessly before the naked face of the universe. I had every scientific discovery, every theory and theorem, every equation, every prof, and a million, million, million books and songs and movies and games--more than any one person, even a ship mind, could ever hope to consume. And yet . . .' He trailed off into a sigh. 'And yet I was alone. I watched my crew starve and die, and when they were gone, there was nothing I could do but sit alone in the dark and wait. I worked on equations, mathematical concepts you could never comprehend with your puny little brain, and I read and watched and counted toward infinity, as the Numerists do. And all it did was stave off the darkness for one more second. One more moment. I screamed, though I have no mouth for screams. I wept, though I have no eyes for tears. I crawled through space and time, a worm inching through a labyrinth built by the dreams of a mad god. This I learned, meatball, this and nothing more: when air, food, and shelter are assured, only two things matter. Work and companionship. To be alone and without purpose is to be the living dead.
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I read the inheritance cycle back to back, over and over again, for months. the second I finished inheritance, I was right back to the first page of eragon. that and discworld were formative works to me. when I discovered science fiction as a genre, a whole new world opened up to me, and it was amazing. but nothing compares to the feeling of learning that the author of the inheritance cycle had written a sci fi novel, and not only that - it was absolutely brilliant. to sleep in a sea of stars is one of the most beautiful, vivid books I have ever read. I'd been a bit apprehensive that maybe paolini wouldn't be as good at sci fi as he was at fantasy, but luckily i was so, so wrong. it was incredible.
I think the ship mind Gregorovich is the most interesting character.
"This is your ship mind speaking. Please make sssure all your belongings are sssafely stored in the overhead compartmentsss. Lash yourself to the massst, me hearties: decoupling commencing, RCS thrusting. We're off to parts unknown to tweak the nose of fate."
~
"I was in fractures before. I am in fractures now. But the pieces still form the same broken picture."
Christopher Paolini holds the Guinness World Record for youngest author of a bestselling series. The series in question, The Inheritance Cycle, was one of my favourites as a child and remains so today. He’s been one of my biggest inspirations for writing and storytelling.
Last week I read To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini. Full disclaimer, I had no idea that was the same author as the Eragon series until I got to the acknowledgements at the end. This was a thousand pages of hard sf space opera, and the whole time I was thinking "I should check out this guy's other stuff too!"
Imagine The Thing, but more futuristic and set on a potential colony planet. You're halfway through that story, and the alien has started attacking your research crew, when suddenly another race of aliens shows up and now you have to team up with it to fight the new aliens. That's the first hundred pages of this book. So many things happen in this story
The overarching background of the story is the war between humanity and these aliens, the Wranaui. It takes place in the 23rd century, and humanity has settled a handful of stellar systems so far and has found relics of sapient aliens, but not met any yet. The main character, Kira, is a xenobiologist who discovers the alien (more of a symbiotic exosuit) that kicks off the war. The story follows her and the spaceship crew that picked her up as they travel from system to system trying to figure out what the suit is, why the aliens attacked, and how to stop them
Sidebar: there's a really cool FTL system in this world, which makes it possible to travel between stars in realtime months. That's still long enough that crews are in cryo for the trip, and FTL communication can't go faster than that, so you get to have your cake of a multi-stellar civilization and eat the isolated worlds where things can change drastically during your travel time too. (One of the appendices is the introductory chapter to a textbook on FTL and UFT; it's so cool)
I feel like this book could easily have been broken up into two or three, there's so much happening. Around the halfway point, the (non-suit) aliens go from being a symbol of death that appears randomly in the sky into multiple defined kinds of aliens, with their own fleshed out motives and sub-factions that can be reasoned about. It all connects, but that seemed like a change in focus that would've been a reasonable pause point. (The last 10% is a much harder diversion from either of sections, but I'll put my thoughts for that under the cut because it's spoilery)
Overall I really enjoyed it. There are more works in the series that I'll definitely be checking out. The xenobiology and especially the physics were incredibly well thought out, and I haven't seen someone play with travel times in such an interesting way before. There were some weaker aspects, especially on the politics side (if Kira goes "surely we can tell the military what we've discovered and they'll apply that information in a way that's beneficial to humanity and humane to the aliens" one more time I will lose it), but at least that mostly seems to be an in-universe character flaw (spoiler alert: the military does not). It is kinda funny how Kira makes a big deal about trying not to see the soldiers who get in their way, but narratively we need a bunch of alien mooks to kill, so they have to come up with a contrived reason (alien brain backup tech) to make that not count as murder
Spoilers for the ending:
Context: the final bad guys are a different group of aliens called the Corrupted that are a sapient gray goo, and are derived from the same tech as the suit symbiote. Kira merges with their central body and takes it over, self-destructing their army and converting them towards positive life-preserving ends. That felt a little shark-jumpy, but is fine
How that played out was super cringey though. First an uncomfortable sex scene before the final battle in which she wonders if she can still get pregnant while the symbiote is attached; then she learns that the suit was supposed to be a self-directed terraforming tool called the Seed; then as part of the positive gray goo, she positions herself as the Mother, a weird archdruid-in-space. It all just gave me the ick and didn't feel like it matched the tone of the rest of the book at all
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The cover for Fractal Noise by Christopher Paolini is here! This novel populates another corner of the expansive scifi world(s) of the Fractalverse that began with 2020′s To Sleep In a Sea of Stars 👽🌃
Coming 5.16.23
MORE ABOUT FRACTAL NOISE
July 25th, 2234: The crew of the Adamura discovers the Anomaly.
On the seemingly uninhabited planet Talos VII:a circular pit, 50 kilometers wide.
Its curve not of nature, but design.
Now, a small team must land and journey on foot across the surface to learn who built the hole and why.
But they all carry the burdens of lives carved out on disparate colonies in the cruel cold of space.
For some the mission is the dream of the lifetime, for others a risk not worth taking, and for one it is a desperate attempt to find meaning in an uncaring universe.
Each step they take toward the mysterious abyss is more punishing than the last.
And the ghosts of their past follow.
