Christopher Paolini and I go way back. Growing up I loved the Inheritance Cycle—or rather, I loved the first two books. Eagon was a fun ride for what it was although it took me a second reading really to appreciate Eldest. Unfortunately, by the time I reached high school I had, for the most part, moved on.

I eventually did finish Brisingr, but it left nothing to me. I barely have any memory of actually reading it. When Inheritance came out, I simply ignored it and seldom, if ever, thought of Paolini again.

A few months ago, a coworker told me about To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, a sci-fi offering from a now very grown-up Christopher Paolini.

I thought, great, maybe this will ignite my love of his works? He’s an adult now, he has experience, gravitas. I’ll give this a read.

To start off this review, I want to say that I don’t regret reading Stars. It was fun, a solid reading experience. But the book left me with a sense of missed opportunity, of near-incompleteness.

There’s a lot of good ideas in this book and each one is sort of picked up, given a cursory examination, and gently set back down again as we move onto the next item of interest. After finishing the novel, I just couldn’t shake the sense that Paolini told the wrong story—that he missed out on the far more interesting tales going on it the background.

Part of what makes the background seem so much more interesting is the absolute bore of a character that is Kira, our POV main protagonist.

Kira has the flavor a passive observer. Things happen to Kira.

Some of this passivity is a product of the universe she inhabits—one that takes orders. Kira is a scientist for a major corporation, she takes orders or she doesn’t get paid; the government is a military dictatorship and she does what they say because she’s a good citizen.

When Kira does finally muscle up some agency, its too little to late. Her character is one that allows things to happen to her, why the sudden shift in attitude?

A story where things happen to an everyman character isn’t necessarily a bad one, but passivity in fiction can be perilous for the writer. There are time where Paolini seems to peek out of the clouds and offer his characters a dues ex machina.

“Wow, that was lucky!” Isn’t really the kind of thing a reader wants to be thinking about how the last story crisis played out. There’s a time and place for that kind of narrative trick, but for Kira, it just reiterates her passivity. She is not calm, cool, collected, or competent. Moments for character growth are unearned—or worse, boring.

Which leads me to my next big issue with Stars. The space travel is boring.

Because of the way Paolini designed FTL space travel, it necessitates that most of the characters go into deep freeze. Kira, immune to the drugs that put people under, spends weeks by herself and Kira simply isn’t interesting enough to make these long periods of narrative fun or stimulating.

Kira’s “progress” made during these FTL trips are a slog to read through, lending to the overall sense of her nonparticipation. Her development feels unearned because the only person she really contends with is herself.

My third, and perhaps my biggest issue with Stars is the direct cause of that sense of incompleteness I mentioned above.

Paolini has created a horrific galaxy filled with technological marvels that stretch the bounds of science and good sense. He’s placed normal people into a place of deep disquiet, but whenever he draws close to pulling out a thread of that existential terror, he draws back and I’m left asking “wait, what? Go back to that, talk about that!”   

At some point, the rebel alien faction mentions that they agreed with the main alien faction’s original plan to invade and conquer human space, they only changed their minds because they felt they needed the help of the humans to defeat a bigger threat.  

This revelation, which is great fodder for storytelling, is barely touched outside a mention here or there.  

But it goes deeper than just missed opportunities.

Like most modern sci-fi, Stars embraces an unquestioning endorsement of Gnosticism. The characters are only their minds, not the flesh that encases them working in tandem with their souls. Despite that many of the characters have become something else, they insist that they have not, that it’s still “them inside.”

But this isn’t true; by the end, Kira becomes something else in the same way Ship Minds are something else.

I think Paolini wants the reader to feel happy for Kira. She has found peace, or at least purpose. But its hard to reconcile what I’m told to feel with the actuality of what he is describing.

Kira is a Lovecraftian nightmare, a color out of dark space. When she returns from her sojourn, when all her friends are long dead and there is nothing left to tie her to the humanity she is no longer a part of, what’s to stop her from becoming the tyrant of the future? She’s already showed signs of it—spying on her friends, passing out all-powerful gifts, making demands of reasonably skeptical government leaders.

And it’s that disquieting, horrific future that I’m far more interested in. Maybe in the sequel, Paolini will deal with these lingering questions? Maybe Stars is the villain’s origin story? Maybe we’ll meet a Ship Mind made a ship’s mind against their will? Maybe someone will stand up to the military dictatorship? I’m not terribly hopeful, but taking a stab as any of those questions would do a lot towards getting me interested in the next book.

Miscellaneous notes

I’ve been telling people that To Sleep in a Sea of Stars reminds me of Mass Effect Andromeda in that I don’t like any of the characters and just when I think it’s going to let me have fun, it doesn’t.

This seems harsh until you learn that I didn’t hate Andromeda. But I didn’t like Andromeda for the reasons that Bioware wanted me like to Andromeda.

Most of the fun in Andromeda came from being deliberately annoying to my shipmates or picking it apart for its questionable plot or finding interesting ways to break it. In other words, Andromeda was fun when I didn’t take it seriously.  

Towards the end of Stars I couldn’t stop laughing. The ending is mostly silly or it’s saccharine to a ridiculous degree. I’m even laughing as I write this because some of the ending is that outlandish.

Stars is also like Mass Effect in the sense that it’s Mass Effect. There’s a lot of similarities right down to the fact that the audiobook is voiced by Jennifer Hale, the voice of Female Shepard. Paolini doesn’t try to hide this fact, he was upfront with Mass Effect’s influence on his work, and it doesn’t really bother me, but it’s there.

Final Thoughts    

Paolini’s capacity for creativity is undiminished. What he lacks is the writing chops to deal with his topics in a charming and stylistically interesting way. To Sleep in a Sea of Stars is competently written, creatively charged, and fast-paced enough to make its hefty page count a relatively easy read. But there’s little to go back to and most of what I’ll recall years from now is what made it entertaining for the wrong reasons.

I don’t regret reading it, but I can’t recommend it.

I write weird tales of my own, you can see them here! Follow me on Twitter/X.

Above: Starry Night Over the Rhône. Oil on Canvas. Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), Dutch. Currently housed in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, France.