Book Review: To Sleep in a Sea of Stars

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini

My rating: [rating=4]

It’s been a while since I’ve written a book review. Sometimes, when I finish a book, I just don’t feel like writing a review. I want to immediately dive into the next book. This is especially true of books in a series. In this case I have some thoughts I felt like sharing.

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars is a long book. The copy that I read was over 800 pages, excluding the 20 pages of addendum content. Despite its length, I did enjoy this book. I never felt like I was struggling to get through it. It’s written by the author of one of my favorite fantasy series, The Inheritance Cycle.

Fantasy to Sci-Fi

Unlike those books, which are based on fantasy, this book is science fiction. Aside from Star Wars, I don’t actually read a lot of science fiction. I was curious to see how an author can make that transition. Honestly, I think Paolini did pretty good. Actually I wish I had his imagination and creativity to write 800+ pages of some pretty in-depth storytelling!

A short synopsis. Kira is a xenobiologist, while studying the fauna of a nearby planet, she stumbles upon some alien relic. Then war breaks out and now she has to face transformation and potential annihilation.

When you get to almost exactly the half way point, this book takes an unexpected turn. This is also the point in which it became difficult to put the book down.

I only really have one critique and its about this concept of the “fractalverse”, something he used a lot when promoting this book. In fact there is an entire website dedicated to the “fractalverse” that will give you some more in depth details about the characters, aliens, ships and planets. However, I don’t feel like it was really explained that well in the book. Fractals are mentioned and its mostly in reference to the Soft Blade but I don’t get any real sense of its “vastness”.

It’s a great book and good science fiction. I would still recommend reading it and perhaps take a look at some of the images of Kira on the website. It will give you some great imagery as to what the Soft Blade looks like.

I hope you enjoy it.

/cheers