Book Review: "The Deep Sky" by Yume Kitasei

4/5 stars

*Spoiler alert!*

The Deep Sky is a debut speculative science fiction whodunit by Yume Kitasei, although it is definitely about much more: climate change, environmentalism, extremist movements, space exploration, and the complicated relationships between best friends and those between parent and child.

Asuka is one of 80 of an all-female crew selected to board a ship—the Phoenix—to a new world— “Planet X” —as Earth is in a full climate crisis. (One of Asuka’s most formative memories is spending time with her family in a tent camp in California because the old growth forests were on fire.) These future astronauts are expected to raise a generation of children about halfway through the journey to their new world.

“They would sleep through the next 3,650 sunsets over this place.

They would never stand here again.

But then, that was the nature of time. You could never return to the same point, just a facsimile of it.”

After being awakened from 10 years of cryogenic sleep, Asuka is called to help on a routine spacewalk to identify an unknown object on the side of the ship. This routine spacewalk goes downhill very fast, leading to an explosion, and the crew pointing fingers at everyone, including Asuka, who is tasked by the ship’s captain to investigate.

The readers toggle through Asuka’s childhood and experiences at the hyper-competitive Even Star training academy, designed to winnow down the candidate pool for the Phoenix mission.

It is not difficult to sympathize with Asuka, who constantly feels out of place, last picked for the mission to represent a country she knows very little about. (Her mother is Japanese, but her father was born and raised in America. She grew up in the USA and has spent most of her time there.) She misses her brother, Luis, who tragically drowned in a pool around the time her family was evacuated from a wildfire zone. (An immersive reality technology, DAR, was involved. Luis was in the pool using DAR to simulate walking on the Moon.)

The conflicts of Earth naturally follow the Phoenix crew when the explosion occurs and leaves three dead, including the ship’s captain, and knocks the ship off course. Weird things happen with the DAR systems onboard, individual, and public, and the AI appears to be going haywire. If that wasn’t enough to worry about, suspicion is spreading like a virus, and threatening to break out in violence.

“Here we are. Middle of nowhere, no Mission Control, complete anarchy, a very sick AI, and one of us is a murdering traitor, but we don’t know who. Oh yeah, and if we don’t correct our course in the next sixteen hours, we and our children may die a very painful death. So what are we going to do now?”

The world Kitasei explores, full of extremist movements, political instability, climate crisis, and cut-throat academic competition, feels very real. I think that is why The Deep Sky continues to occupy my thoughts long after I have finished the book. I can’t wait to see what Kitasei writes next!

Happy reading!

--BookOwl