To Sleep in a Sea of Stars

Reads very much like it was written by a 12 year old

Wow! What an amazing world Paolini wrote. Deep and rich and vibrant and full of people with their own personalities. This is a deep dive into the psyche and healing during a newly sprung war. The characters wrestled with their own moral dilemmas, their own pains, and the interconnectedness of their lives that allowed them to support each other.

Aliens, space battles, the vastness of space, run away military, and smugglers. Hits all the scifi buttons and delivers on them!

The audio book runs about 31 hours for the book itself (it also includes appendices and some author commentary, bringing it to 33). Jennifer Hale did a phenomenal job of bringing the characters to life.

Paolini kann vielleicht Phantasie. Eine Phantasie-Story in die Zukunft und den Weltraum zu verlegen macht leider noch keinen brauchbaren Science-Fiction-Roman. Selten so ein uninspierertes und vorhersehbares Buch gelesen.

Wow. Never ever bored. Gripping exciting stuff. Enjoyed every page.

I originally found a hardcover copy of this book in a "free books" bin, then borrowed the audiobook edition from the library. I definitely enjoyed it, but I never felt emotionally invested in the characters. The episodic nature of the plot made the book feel very long; whenever I expected things to wrap up another conflict was tacked on.

It's a good book, but it should have been 2/3 the length. Overall, it's a interesting story with interesting characters. Unfortunately, I feel like it was written to be a certain length. I am rating this at 4 instead of 3 because I listened to the audiobook, which (for me) makes me more tolerant of slow parts.

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars is an epic space-opera, spanning a vast amount of both space and time in a fascinating, fantasy-like galaxy. Despite its size, I dug through this book in 4 days, and every minute spent was worth it, worth being immersed in this breath-catching science fiction novel set in a vivid world with amazing characters.

Fun, tropy, and full of excellent starship names and cute callouts to scifi's past. Paolini delivers what he's great at: sprawling adventures that focus on the cool things you can do with magic, though as with Eragon, this magic leans more towards the technological. It follows rules, and we thrill in the characters exploration of those rules. Nobody here is making stupid mistakes; a whole bunch if very smart people are in space and unfortunately sometimes they're going to ruin each other's days.

Plot plot plot ... never a moment to think

I don't normally like this kinda SiFi, it got a bit too much for me at the end. But the book got me hooked and I read it to the end and truly enjoyed it and I wanted to read it. There wasn't any points in the story I had to fight my way through.

Read this because it was the winner of the 2020 sci-fi category on goodreads.

WTF Goodreads.

Irritating characters, with predicable plot arcs, feeling exposition.

This would have been a hard pass if i hadn't been reading it to my daughter.

I enjoyed this. My only complaint was about some of the meditation inspired paragraphs, stuff about clearing your mind and such. As someone who is a serious meditator, these things stood out to me as poor representations and/or unskillful ways of relating to the mind. They all seemed to be drawn from pop-culture which doesn't really know much about meditation

So, in this book there's an AI and it calls some of the ppl it works for "meatbag"! Can you imagine? AI is supposed to be respectful and this one is snide! Wow, great stuff. That and so many more piping fresh ideas about SF in this masterpiece.