I briefly mentioned “The Deep Sky” in my review of Generation Ship and even though I wasn’t a huge fan of the book, it does deserve a separate review here.
The premise of the book is familiar enough: Earth is falling apart with ecosystems dying from climate change, cities burning or being flooded, and animal species being replaced by robo-imitations as their biological originals are increasingly unable to cope with the harmful environment on earth. Against this backdrop, earth’s nations have decided to join forces sponsoring a mission into deep space in the hope of finding a new home for (parts of) humanity. And to find the best candidates for this mission, the world decides to set up summer camp meets hunger games for girls (girls only!) to select and train the future astronauts. Once onboard, most of the crew goes to sleep for 10 years - and as they awake things go horribly wrong.
The story in space follows Asuka, one of the young women on board grappling with the aftermath of an explosion that threatens to undermine the ship and the mission as the story evolves into a space whodunit: It quickly becomes clear that the explosion was not an accident. Is it a computer gone wrong? A stand-alone saboteur on board? Or was the incident controlled from factions on earth trying to stop humanity’s foray into space?
The author spends a lot of time describing space camp: Young people confined in one place and subjected to strict training and testing regimes. This part of the story feels very familiar. Friendship and competition, hurt feelings, deception and exhaustion. And while the author goes to great lenghts to detail the back story of Asuka, other characters in the book remain incredibly flat.
The storyline on the ship is gripping. However, it sometimes feel very far fetched (it is scifi - it should be far fetched - but still) and tries very hard to add layer on layer of obfuscation in order to keep the reader guessing. Part of a whodunit’s fascination is trying to understand what’s actually going on. In “The Deep Sky”, this quickly feels impossible. While this can be entertaining (think “The Usual Suspects”) it is hard to pull this off without the reader feeling somewhat misled - this is what happened to me with The Deep Sky.
Unfortunately, it does feel at times like the author was trying to pack too much into the story to really develop this into a fully compelling book: When trying to weave together childhood trauma, parent-child conflict, ecological disaster, world politics, disinformation, being adrift between different cultures, gender identity, possible motherhood, a coming of age novel, a metaverse on steroids, and a space adventure (as much as all of these are worth writing about) something has got to give. As a result, it feels like “The Deep Sky” is neither here nor there: It doesn’t really develop characters beyond Asuka, leaves many elements of Asuka’s story just barely touched upon, doesn’t really explore what it means if people live in individually constructed virtual worlds while inhabiting the same physical space, and leads the reader astray in the core mistery of the book.
It would be easy to say this wasn’t a good book - but that doesn’t really capture it. I did actually enjoy reading “The Deep Sky”. But for all the good elements and promising ideas, the book left me disappointed about a lot of these ideas not being developed further. The basic premise could have made a gripping thriller, an interesing “young-adult” read, or a deep exploration of Asuka’s life. In trying to be all of the above, it fails to excel at any one of them.
As it stands, this book could have used another 100-200 pages to really explore all the aspects touched upon further. Or alternatively, this book would probably have been better if it had focused its 397 pages (for the print edition) on a narrower set of topics.