Review: The Stardust Grail

The Stardust Grail by Yume Kitasei
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I know a lot of people hate the star rating system, but I find it useful. My definitions of my "stars" run the gamut from 1 (hated and likely did not finish) to 5 (loved, amazing, shout the book's virtues from the rooftops; which has happened this year only twice so far, with Robert Jackson Bennett's The Tainted Cup and Samantha Mills' The Wings Upon Her Back ).

A 3, to me, is middling. It was readable and I liked it, but it has significant flaws. That is very much the case with this book, an archaeological space opera that is trying to be an Indiana Jones-style romp but gets bogged down in plot issues.

Here, our protagonist Maya Hoshimoto is, or was for ten years, a thief: returning stolen alien artifacts to their rightful owners, and also looking for the titular "stardust grail," a possibly mythical item that would save her dear friend Auncle, an octopus-jellyfish alien. After she and Auncle unwittingly transmitted a virus that caused the deaths of an entire clan of aliens on one of their jobs, Maya breaks with Auncle and returns to Earth, trying to resume her education and live a somewhat more normal life. But the lure of traveling the galaxy still beckons, and Auncle comes after her, insisting xe has found a path to the grail, and asking her to do one last job.

Of course we know the "one last job" trope invariably leads to disaster, and so it is in this case. In this future, Maya's friend Auncle is a Frenro, and ancient species that created the Interstellar Web, the network of wormholes that makes space travel possible. There is considerable weight of history to this settling; whole civilizations have risen and fallen before humans ever got to space, and there is a region in the Interstellar Web called the "Dead Sea," consisting of many systems and planets scoured clean of life. (It's definitely a takeoff of Andre Norton's Forerunners.) The setting is one of the most interesting parts of the book, and I wish the author had devoted more time to it.

But as the title indicates, we must have our pursuit of the grail (to be fair, it seems to be the only thing that allows Frenro to reproduce, so the survival of a species is at stake). It is in this pursuit that the aforementioned plot holes start popping up. For instance, in this world there is an alien virus that has infected many species, including humans, and because of it Maya and Auncle can communicate telepathically. This information is casually dropped about a quarter of the way in with no exploration of the ramifications of a psychic link between a human and an alien. Considering that as the story goes on, the Frenro are revealed to have done many reprehensible things, including possibly committing genocide--and Auncle was able to hide that from Maya, even though they have a telepathic link? I don't think so. (Especially since as a character, Auncle seems to have few, if any filters, just spitting out whatever crosses xyr mind.)

What the Frenro are revealed to have done is the bigger and more important plot hole, however. It's not dealt with in this story (although I supposed it could be in the sequel, if there is one). To put it bluntly, the Frenro are....not a nice species, and Auncle knew about most of it. They have a kind of hive mind, called the Whole, and during the course of the chase for the grail Auncle takes Maya and their crew to the Frenro's hidden home world, and there reunites with the Whole. But the Frenro, whose perception of time allows them to see possible futures, have seen that humans are coming to destroy them--and in a Terminator-style loop, bring about the very circumstances of the humans' retaliation.

This is all dumped into the story at the climax, and it's very disappointing. There are some major ethics issues here, and they are not dealt with at all. Maya also forgives her friend far too easily. The Maya-Auncle relationship is well written up to that point, but it seems to me the revelations of the climax should inspire her to take a big step back and perform a major re-evaluation of her friend...and she doesn't do it.

Maybe you can overlook these plot holes and contradictions. I could, sort of. But they did impart a shallowness to the story, to its detriment. So while I liked this in the end, it's certainly not making my list of the best books of the year.

View all my reviews