The Deep Sky

I am not normally a fan of outer space, but I gobbled up Yume Kitasei’s The Deep Sky regardless. The premise is this: At some point in a future that looks disturbingly like our present (what with all the climate-related environmental collapses), Asuka spends years competing to be part of a mission to Planet X. After winning a spot—but only as an alternate—she and the rest of the crew are put to into hibernation for ten years; a year after they wake up, Asuka goes on a space walk that goes horribly wrong, killing three other crew members. The new captain tasks Asuka with finding out how this could have happened, and Asuka sleuths her way to the solution while grappling with her own feelings of inadequacy.

I really enjoyed this, even though, again, not a big fan of space. The details of the mission were fascinating to me: For instance, everyone onboard has to be capable of and willing to give birth in order to populate Planet X, so no cis dudes. As a result, like a third of the crew is pregnant at the time of the incident, which is mildly hilarious (and also heartbreaking in some instances). Also, about half of the book takes place in the past while Asuka is competing to get into the program, so there’s a boarding school element that I very much appreciated. I do have two complaints, one of which is probably petty, but shrug emoji, I am who I am. First, the non-petty complaint: I figured out who was responsible for the deaths long before the end of the book, and I’m a fucking idiot, so that’s not good. I didn’t figure out why they did it, though, so the mystery works on that level, but this may bother people who want to be thoroughly confounded until the very end.

The absolutely petty complaint is that Kitasei does a bunch of extended metaphors with birds, and thanks, I hate it? It got to the point that I just skipped the passages about birds, which was unfortunate, because they were actually part of the mystery. This is very much a me-problem, but I personally fucking hate figurative language like that; I find it so clunky and boring. But again, it’s not like there’s no purpose to it, and you might enjoy that stylistic choice. It definitely didn’t seriously impede my enjoyment of the novel as a whole.

All in all, I liked this book and I’m looking forward to Kitasei’s next novel, which comes out later this year. 4/5