The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei is out in mid July 2023, and it’s a thoughtful story with all the right beats of both philosophical and mysterious. A huge thank you to Flatiron Books for inviting me to participate in the blog tour and for sending the arc as part of my participation!
The Deep Sky
By Yume Kitasei | Goodreads
Yume Kitasei’s The Deep Sky is an enthralling sci-fi thriller debut about a mission into deep space that begins with a lethal explosion that leaves the survivors questioning the loyalty of the crew.
They left Earth to save humanity. They’ll have to save themselves first.
It is the eve of Earth’s environmental collapse. A single ship carries humanity’s last hope: eighty elite graduates of a competitive program, who will give birth to a generation of children in deep space. But halfway to a distant but livable planet, a lethal bomb kills three of the crew and knocks The Phoenix off course. Asuka, the only surviving witness, is an immediate suspect.
Asuka already felt like an impostor before the explosion. She was the last picked for the mission, she struggled during training back on Earth, and she was chosen to represent Japan, a country she only partly knows as a half-Japanese girl raised in America. But estranged from her mother back home, The Phoenix is all she has left.
With the crew turning on each other, Asuka is determined to find the culprit before they all lose faith in the mission—or worse, the bomber strikes again.
CW: miscarriage, fertility issues, terrorism, death of a child, racism, gore, strong language
Review of The Deep Sky
Sci-Fi Elements
As a fan of science fiction, I’ve always enjoyed the “one-way space mission” story framework. The Deep Sky adds to that foundation by having an integral element to the story that I haven’t seen in many other places– those on the space mission have an active communication with Earth and they are highly invested in what’s going on in Earth’s politics. Alternatively, Earth has high expectations and investments in this space mission, and while many space-exploration missions I’ve read before have a strict boundary of “saying goodbye forever,” the attachments on Earth are strong and a large part of the plot due to various political factions and priorities. These factions are seen to switch over time as various political shifts of power happen on Earth, and this ends up raising a lot of good questions along the way.
Characters
The cast of characters, like many mysteries, vary from more in depth to slightly mentioned. There’s one point of view, Asuka, and she wrestles with her identity as who she was on earth and who she is on the spaceship and how those play into each other. She interacts a lot with the other crew members– who are all suspects of the ship’s sabotage. Like many mysteries, there’s suspicion, a whodunit feel, and a grand reveal at the end. I liked how it ended and the character line up and building up to the finale made sense for the characters, especially given the ties back to Earth.
Themes
One large theme in this book is fertility. Part of ensuring the survival of humanity on the next planet that the crew settle on, a requirement of the crew is that they have uteruses and opt-in to artificial insemination in order to birth the next generation of humans. There is not a strict adhesion to she/her pronouns, and I appreciated that distinction between biology and gender expression. Required pregnancy feels a bit dystopian to me–and I believe that’s intentional–but the characters all fairly accept the matter as a part of the price for being chosen on this mission.
Another theme in this book is the reliance on Artificial Intelligence. Each of the characters are plugged into their own chosen artificial reality: it could be a forest, a fantasy world, a tropical island, anything. Basically, this augmented reality helps the characters avoid cabin fever and coexist with the goal of petty tensions being mostly avoided. Asuka loves birds, and she loves building her augmented reality around a forest hiking trail and her childhood safe spaces. It made me think, if I was able to choose an augmented reality to help the day-by-day monotony be a little easier, what would I pick? It’s honestly hard to choose, but I think it would definitely be somewhere outside in the mountains in a forest as well. The ship’s computer is a main character in the book, and Asuka interacts with it quite a bit, and I appreciated how the artificial intelligence aspect was a main contributing factor to the story overall.
Overall, as a debut book, this book is extremely well done. I loved the overall thrill of the mystery, and I found the thoughtful elements to be profound, and this was a book I thought about long after finishing. It has a combined feel of both sci-fi but also speculative fiction of the state of the near future. While many sci-fi’s leave the current world way behind, this one is intentional in being tied to the past, and what that means has incredible depth for both the characters and the reader. If you’re looking for a science fiction space murder mystery with a lot of consideration to themes and big existential questions, I highly recommend it! Thank you again to the publisher for the blog tour invite, and thank you for reading my thoughts!
Cover image: Photo on Unsplash
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