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To Sleep in a Sea of Stars

Christopher Paolini

Tor (Buy from *)

THE first 50 pages of Christopher Paolini鈥檚 new blockbuster, To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, are standard-issue space opera. Kira Navarez is a xenobiologist in a skeleton crew surveying a barren planet for colonisation. On the last day of the mission, she investigates an unexpected sign of life and does her job a bit too well. Soon enough, a xenomorph is clawing its way out of her innards.

Yet the moment you think, 鈥渨ait a second, isn鈥檛 this kind of familiar?鈥�, Paolini is right there ahead of you with a spaceship AI winkingly named Bishop and a planet called Weyland. Just as you recognise the homages to the Alien franchise, Paolini seamlessly slides into the next theme 鈥� a symbiote straight out of Venom 鈥� before morphing into Starship Troopers. Suddenly, the captain of a janky starship appears, with a wicked smile and a blaster strapped to his thigh. Next up: Lovecraftian extra-dimensional horrors with many tentacles.

Paolini鈥檚 previous effort, The Inheritance Cycle, is an incredibly readable young adult fantasy series that came under fire for borrowing a bit too liberally from source material like The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars.

Even so, the books soared to the top of all kinds of lists. You could forgive Paolini given he started writing the first instalment, Eragon, when he was 15 鈥� he was even awarded a world record as the youngest author of a bestselling book series. At 36, his first adult sci-fi novel doesn鈥檛 have the excuse of youth or a young audience unexposed to his sources of inspiration. So is it derivative? Yes 鈥� and it is brilliant.

Detailing each borrowed part at length would be as irrelevant as pointing out, for example, that few of today鈥檚 songs succeed without the scaffolding of much older funk, soul, house and rock samples. The pearl-clutcher song du jour, WAP by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, is built on a 1992 club track by Frank Ski. Sampling has been going on since the 1940s, so questions about the line between inspiration and derivativeness are hardly new.

鈥淪uddenly, the captain of a janky starship appears, with a wicked smile and a blaster strapped to his thigh鈥�

In To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, Paolini鈥檚 鈥渟amples鈥� are less like those in WAP and more like the ones used by Gregg Gillis, the late-2000s mash-up artist better known as Girl Talk. Gillis gleefully skirted copyright laws by sampling just enough of a song to be recognisable before layering it into the next short sample. Each of the resulting songs was a beautiful mosaic of dozens of tracks fractionated and overlaid to create a new resonance and meaning.

Like a Girl Talk album, the point is the larger quilt that Paolini stitches out of all these samples. It is a beautiful reminder 鈥� straight out of the hallucinatory writing of Italo Calvino 鈥� that even as we slog through this uniquely rancorous era, in which everyone is fighting everyone over disease, populism, climate change and inequality, we still have a much bigger calling to attend to.

鈥淲e are the mind of the universe itself,鈥� Navarez learns. 鈥淲e are the universe watching itself and learning.鈥� Learning, perhaps, how to escape the inevitability of extinction.

My advice? Ride out the ongoing threat of covid-19 and the end of democracy with this doorstopper. There is nothing quite like a 1000-page tome with undersized font, oversized pages and immense themes to remind us that this, too, shall pass, and that our purpose is bigger than the strife in which we are now mired.