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The Deep Sky: A Novel
Yume Kitasei's The Deep Sky is an enthralling sci fi thriller debut about a mission into deep space that begins with a lethal explosion that leaves the survivors questioning the loyalty of the crew.
They left Earth to save humanity. They'll have to save themselves first. It is the eve of Earth's environmental collapse. A single ship carries humanity's last hope: eighty elite graduates of a competitive program, who will give birth to a generation of children in deep space. But halfway to a distant but livable planet, a lethal bomb kills three of the crew and knocks The Phoenix off course. Asuka, the only surviving witness, is an immediate suspect. As the mystery unfolds on the ship, poignant flashbacks reveal how Asuka came to be picked for the mission. Despite struggling through training back on Earth, she was chosen to represent Japan, a country she only partly knows as a half-Japanese girl raised in America. But estranged from her mother back home, The Phoenix is all she has left. With the crew turning on each other, Asuka is determined to find the culprit before they all lose faith in the mission--or worse, the bomber strikes again.BUY THE BOOK
Community Reviews
There were a lot of things this book did that were interesting. It contained a cast of characters that were all designated female at birth in a spaceship headed toward Planet X. I could only count four male characters in the novel, the main character’s father and brother, a random guy at a party, and a crew member. No one was physically described. The novel had a lot to say about technology and politics. It was the technology that most interested me. It had the potential to be a truly horrifying novel. It wasn’t. It was boring. The flashbacks were the worst and didn’t add a lot of context to the current timeline. I never connected to any of the characters, the only ones I could differentiate were Ruth and Micky and that was primarily because I didn’t like them. The science was hazy. The current timeline was fuzzy. The timeline post-explosion was clear and broken up by shift, but how long had they been awake? The fact that they were all being artificially inseminated was an odd detail that was never fully explained. Also, I wish the characters just had been identified primarily by one name. It was confusing that they had first names, last names, and nicknames that were not derived from either. That probably would have been less of a problem if there hadn’t been so many characters that did not have distinct characteristics.
Content warning for sci-fi violence, racism, death, manipulation, and related topics. I really enjoyed this novel. The setting is incredible, I really liked the flashbacks and the worldbuilding. I guessed the saboteur pretty early, but it didn't stop me from enjoying the novel. There are a few things that were a little out of my grasp (some of the science of trajectory and so forth) but it was a really fun read.
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