Skip to main content

Starsight (SF) - Brandon Sanderson *****

The first book in this trilogy, Skyward, was good - but Starsight isn't in the same league. It's ten times better. From the opening few pages where we are plunged into a dogfight in space, readers are sucked into an adventure that doesn't let up. The previous novel was slow starting, but got to be a real page turner in the last few chapters - here, the need read on is relentless from the very beginning.

Apart from not needing to introduce the main character Spensa and go through the process of reassembling her find of a unique intelligent ship, which runs through the first half of the original novel, what really makes this addition to the trilogy so much better is it dispenses almost entirely with the juvenilia. Spensa may still be a teenager, but she spends the majority of the book away from her friends and what results is a much more mature piece of writing. It can still be read and enjoyed by younger readers, but it works far better for the older reader by effectively being ageless: this is the best kind of crossover.

In the first book, the enemy aliens were pretty much faceless - here we go into full Star Trek mode as Spensa goes on an undercover mission and discovers a whole mix of aliens from suspiciously humanoid to downright strange. This includes a race who appear to be vaporous and another with one of the most original means of reproduction I've come across. If there's a fault with the aliens, as Zaphod Beeblebrox's analyst might have said, 'They're just people, you know?' They might be physically very different, but the personalities were consistently anthropomorphic. Having said that, it gives Brandon Sanderson an opportunity to bring in the idea that 'the enemy' are not faceless fiends, but intelligent entities trying to get on with their lives.

As well as giving Spensa and her increasingly human AI-driven ship a very satisfying mission, the book opens up a much deeper threat to the fragile existence of the human outpost Spensa was born on, and explores the nature of Spensa's special ability. Although it's not difficult to guess the big reveal of the nature of the aliens' faster-than-light drive at least 100 pages earlier than it comes, there is still an intriguing complexity in the new discoveries that emerge in what elsewhere might be known as hyperspace.

We don't totally abandon Spensa's friends on her home planet, with a couple of interludes taking us back to them, and there is some character development for at least one of them. We also find out more about Spensa's strange alien slug-like pet. In my review of Skyward I said it 'surely [the slug] is going to be given more to do in a sequel'. This does happen - though I'm not sure if we are seeing a typo or an indicator of more reveals to come in a line where, in parroting Spensa, the slug corrects her grammar.

I thought the first book was too long. Starsight is only 50 pages shorter at around 450 pages, but this feels just right. There's an awful lot of action to get in, and enough genuinely clever depth to continue to intrigue the reader, and to make me already eager for volume three.

If I were to sum it up with a pop culture note, Starsight is Terminator 2 to Skwyard's Terminator.

Hardback:   
Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that â€˜Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...

We Are Eating the Earth - Michael Grunwald *****

If I'm honest, I assumed this would be another 'oh dear, we're horrible people who are terrible to the environment', worthily dull title - so I was surprised to be gripped from early on. The subject of the first chunk of the book is one man, Tim Searchinger's fight to take on the bizarrely unscientific assumption that held sway that making ethanol from corn, or burning wood chips instead of coal, was good for the environment. The problem with this fallacy, which seemed to have taken in the US governments, the EU, the UK and more was the assumption that (apart from carbon emitted in production) using these 'grown' fuels was carbon neutral, because the carbon came out of the air. The trouble is, this totally ignores that using land to grow fuel means either displacing land used to grow food, or displacing land that had trees, grass or other growing stuff on it. The outcome is that when we use 'E10' petrol (with 10% ethanol), or electricity produced by ...