Yume Kitasei: Deep Sky (2023, Cengage Gale)
English language
Published July 3, 2023 by Cengage Gale.
A great combination scifi thriller / space whodunit. It's much more Serious than The Stardust Grail, but explores some similar themes, e.g. betrayal and loss.
People with wombs are selected to colonize a new planet (yuck) because people on earth are too busy destroying themselves & climate change has become too violent at scale. They travel with thousands of specimens to be used for artificial insemination.
I really liked this plot twist on how people get chosen. It's a murder mystery that is sorta melancholic that ends on a more hopeful note. I felt really sad reading about the climate change and how the last hummingbird was caged in a zoo that was then hit by a missile. It really gutted me because thats what is happening now in Lebanon & Palestine.
Otherwise, my only criticism is that this book is too kind to fascists.
A few explanations felt overly simple, but I was impressed for a few of the explored themes to unexpectedly tie together at the finish.
The Deep Sky is the story of a crew of late teen/early 20s women (mostly) who make up the crew of the first interstellar spaceship. Their goal is to establish a colony on a planet orbiting another star, hence why everyone has to be capable of bearing children. There's mention of one trans dude and a couple of possibly non-binary folk, but by and large the crew is female. The story alternates between episodes on board and flashbacks to crew member Asuka's time on Earth with her family and in the ultra-competitive institute that is both training and selecting crew members.
When the story begins, Asuka and her friend Kate are about to go on a spacewalk to investigate an anomaly on the exterior of the ship. They decide to race, and Kate reaches the anomaly first and thus is the person who dies when the bomb goes off.
Despite …
The Deep Sky is the story of a crew of late teen/early 20s women (mostly) who make up the crew of the first interstellar spaceship. Their goal is to establish a colony on a planet orbiting another star, hence why everyone has to be capable of bearing children. There's mention of one trans dude and a couple of possibly non-binary folk, but by and large the crew is female. The story alternates between episodes on board and flashbacks to crew member Asuka's time on Earth with her family and in the ultra-competitive institute that is both training and selecting crew members.
When the story begins, Asuka and her friend Kate are about to go on a spacewalk to investigate an anomaly on the exterior of the ship. They decide to race, and Kate reaches the anomaly first and thus is the person who dies when the bomb goes off.
Despite being told these are highly competent people, the crew never feels like a crew trained to work together. They neglect their duties. They let personal animosities not only interfere, but drive them. To do anything at scale, you need a competent team, not just a set of competent individuals. The book seems to miss that.
To be fair, the entire sabotage plot wouldn't work like it does if this was a competent team. It'd be a very different book.
All that aside, at about halfway through the plot became less navel-gazy and I was finally able to suspend disbelief well enough to read through to the end. When something is actually happening, such as Asuka finally doing some investigation or the saboteur stepping up attacks some of the flaws can be ignored.
