Just a rant, I guess, full of spoilers:
Spoilers ahead
I liked the first book in the series so I was kinda excited for this prequel.
Sadly, it was just a boring slog of a read, literally the whole book is the main character whining about his wife dying while traveling to a recently discovered hole made by aliens. There are also two over-the-top characters who constantly argue with each other about religion. And one character who’s kinda just there. All of them are also scientists who make so many stupid decisions that leave all of them either crippled or dead.
In the end the main character reaches the hole, looks over the edge, sees nothing and decides to go back. That’s it, that’s the grand conclusion.
It’s not that I don’t get what the book was trying to say and that it was pretty much just a metaphor for overcoming loss of your loved ones, it’s that it sucked.
You can replace literally any part of the story with anything else and the story doesn’t change - drop all sci-fi elements, replace the hole with any other object/place that’s far away in a hard-to-reach terrain, replace really whatever you want with something else and it’s still the same story.
Overall, this could have been interesting if it was about 50 pages long and if it didn’t claim it was in any way related to the first book.
Yup. I just finished it myself. I was hoping there would be some sort of reward for slogging through such a poorly written book. Nothing. I’m irritated. It was pointless. I don’t know if it would have been any better as a short story, honestly… but maybe, with some adjustments. I saw somewhere that it was inspired by a nightmare? That would explain it a bit… but still it was too long and felt pointless.
To Sleep in the Sea of Stars had it’s issues… too many things happen virtualy the same way with slight differences multiple times, but it had a narrative, it was interesting and new, and I enjoyed it overall. Unfortunately he rambles a bit (Eragon book 3) and needs to be rained in sometimes, which is unfortunate because he has some good ideas. I hope the new book in the Eragon series doesn’t suck. I recently found and read the set of three short stories in that series and I really liked them, probably because they were short and to the point.
I guess there are worse things in the world right now to be complaining about.