thistlechaser | Book #94 of 2023: To Sleep in a Sea of Stars

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini.

I love YA books, but wow it's so nice to read a story with a reasonable adult woman as the main character.

Set in the distant future, humanity is living on many different planets and terraforming even more for their own use. Humans are, as far as they know, alone in the universe.

The main character, Kira, is a scientist working on one of those uncolonized planets, and by accident she encounters something. An alien species? An ancient alien object? No one knows. But the encounter changes everything.

This book was really long (about four times as long as the last few books I've read), but it went so fast. Christopher Paolini is an amazing author (he wrote the Eragon books which somehow I haven't tried yet, but I have since picked up the first one).

The only negative thing about this book is it's the first book of a series, and three years later the second one isn't out yet. Boo. I hope he hasn't dropped the series!

Eva by Peter Dickinson.

This was such a weird story, and I was worried I wasn't going to get into it, but soon enough it hooked me and swept me along.

Set in the future, humanity was at the species' end. Humans had killed off nearly every animal species, the planet was vastly overpopulated, and in less than a generation the food supply would be gone.

The main character, a 13 year old girl named Eva, got into a bad car accident. She was too injured to survive, so scientists attempted to move her consciousness into a healthy body: A chimp's.

Most of the story was about her adjusting to the body and trying to deal with a chimp's instincts combined with her human mind, though the fame of being the first person to be transplanted like this was a big part of the book, too.

The ending was satisfying, though I don't want to spoil it.

The book was written in the 80s, so there were some things that were amusingly dated: They have the technology for a mind/spirit transplant, but they still use VCRs, landline phones, and tape recorders. I wonder if that's a failure of the author's imagination? To think so far in the future they'd still use those things? People who write about the distant future now don't include things like cellphones... Just a curious thing to think about.

While other books by Dickinson didn't work at all for me, this one was very much worth reading.