Back in February, I attended my favorite panel of Judging a Book by Page 119. The panel’s moderator shared passages from a few books, and I found myself placing two on hold during that panel, and taking a picture of the third to consider later. Both books were on shelf and I tore through one. The other, however, lingered.
I tell people I’m a fan of fantasy and science fiction. In that order. And with a much heavier emphasis placed on the former than the latter. I’m much more often in the mood for fantasy than sci-fi. And, as I kept gazing at this library book through renewal after renewal, I kept reasoning that I wasn’t in the mood for a mystery and an environment of distrust.
Honestly, I still wasn’t. But I’m out of renewals and the book is due tomorrow. So I decided that, as I didn’t want to read another anthology right away, I should finally read The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei.
I had forgotten that one of the things I liked from the preview was the voice. The author’s writing style definitely grabbed my attention and kept me invested. The other realization was that nobody really wanted there to be a traitor. But let me back up.
The Deep Sky is about the voyage of The Phoenix, a ship headed out from earth to colonize Planet X. There are eighty people on board. They spent the first ten years in hibernation, then ten years awake, then the final ten years in hibernation. During the waking decade, the crew are meant to each bear and raise one or two children, so that they’re past the most care-intensive stages when the group lands.
I will note that while having a functional uterus is a prerequisite for the crew, that doesn’t mean it’s a ship of women. There are several nonbinary characters and at least one trans man. At no point do we get a full overview of every single crew member and their pronouns, but that’s because it’s entirely unnecessary. The point is that it is accepted as fact that while everyone is capable of bearing a child, this is not linked to their gender identity.
The eighty people aboard The Phoenix are all that’s left of an initial class of more than seven hundred applicants that trained on Earth a decade prior to launch. Between the mindnumbing amount of work, exceedingly high standards, and potential medical issues, among others, the group was culled and narrowed over the course of ten years. A number of countries paid a fantastic amount of money to secure one or more spots for a representative of their own. There were also five Wild Card spots for the most meritorious who weren’t chosen to represent their country.
The first thing this tells us is that the ship’s crew know each other very well, the way only people who’ve been around each other for twelve years do. Sure, there’s some each person knows better than others, but you still know a little bit about everyone. I can speak with authority because when I graduated high school, there was a core group of about sixty of us who’d been in the same district since kindergarten. And we basically knew who everyone else was, which clique each belonged to, etc.
The second thing is that you’ve definitely got geopolitics at play. The Americans and Chinese both wanted to head the mission, so it was ordained that the Captain would be from one, the Vice Captain the other, and alternating with the third and fourth command as well, just in case. It’s also why our protagonist, Asuka Hoshino-Silva, is representing Japan, despite being half-American.
Asuka doesn’t fit in in a lot of ways. She’s half Japanese and half American, and spent formative years of her life in both countries. She’s also the Alternate, the one person in the crew without a specific duty assigned. This is for two reasons. One, because she was a not-quite last minute addition to the crew after someone else dropped out. Two, because while she was obviously intelligent, talented, and skilled enough to make the crew, she was never the best at anything, hence her lack of specialization.
Oh, and most of the crew call her Susie, an Anglicized version of her name. This grates on me every single time it happens, though it looks like Asuka long since stopped arguing about it. Possibly before she ever heard of the EvenStar program that brought them all together. Conflict is not her forte.
Having spent so much time elucidating the background and setting of the novel, I should probably talk about the plot, at least a little. Asuka and another crewmate are going on a spacewalk to investigate an anomaly on the outer hull of the ship. It shouldn’t be there, therefore it’s a sign of a potential problem. This is confirmed when a bomb goes off, killing three people. Now Asuka, as Alternate, is tasked by the Captain to figure out who did it. But for herself, Asuka wants to know…why?
There’s plenty of obvious reasons. The geopolitical ones I mentioned earlier, such as tensions between China and the U.S. There’s also organized groups, including terrorist groups, and some of the crew have affiliations with them. Suspects are all around Asuka and it’s up to her to figure it out.
One clue seems to be that her DAR, her Digital Augmented Reality, is acting up. This is how she’s accustomed to seeing the ship, through the lens of her own personal virtual reality settings that take away white walls, wires, etc. But something is wrong and it stops working after the bomb. Although when she’s in contact with another person, she can see through their DAR. But weirdly, they don’t see the birds she notices. Or maybe she’s just inclined to notice birds. They’re something of a hobby of hers, to the point that the ship’s AI, Alpha, has instructions to recite bird facts when Asuka needs something soothing.
I thoroughly enjoyed The Deep Sky. It was fully engaging and compelling. I did appreciate the alternating chapters, allowing us flashbacks to Asuka’s past and the crew’s training. Plus, some of those bird facts. Some of which I already knew – thanks Neil Gaiman. It’s a mystery, sure, but there’s more than enough besides that to keep my interest. And I might just have to keep an eye out for whatever else Yume Kitasei will write in the future.
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