Let me pile on the descriptive adjectives: new-adult debut feminist science fiction mystery-thriller set in deep space. Engaging and refreshing, it felt more YA than I expected from the description. The narrator was extremely talented, with different voices and accents (often slipping seamlessly into Japanese) for each character. Still, her tone felt “young,” which makes sense if all the characters are in their early 20s.

“It is the eve of Earth's environmental collapse. A single ship carries humanity's last hope: 80 elite [20-something] 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.” (GoodReads)

Many thanks to NetGalley, Macmillan Audio, and Flatiron Books for the opportunity to read THE DEEP SKY in advance of its publication.

The Deep Sky follows an elite crew in space who are humanity’s last hope. Earth has collapsed and these crew members must survive and reproduce to save the human population. I enjoyed the writing and the premise, and the plot was mostly intriguing. The nonlinear timeline became a bit confusing and repetitive, losing my attention at times. I didn’t feel particularly invested in the outcome or the characters. I was in the mood for a post-apocalyptic story, and really enjoyed the space setting. I’d be so curious to see what this author does next.

In The Deep Sky, a group of youth train for years to leave the earth for a new planet, bearing children as often as possible along the way to form a new colony. Asuka is a Japanese-American who was very nearly not chosen for the mission; she’s only along as the alternate, after someone dropped out. When she and a team member go out to investigate something attached to the side of the ship, an explosion kills three of the crew. Asuka is tasked with investigating what happened.

As Asuka investigates, she has to confront her complicated relationships with the other crew members, some of whom were once her closest friends. She has to figure out who she can trust, in a system where everyone’s lives depend on each other and what’s real isn’t always clear.

Most of the concepts in this book aren’t new. Kitasei explores the idea that the Earth will probably become inhospitable and a colony on another planet may be the only way humanity survives. The mission depends on women (and trans and nonbinary characters) who can both operate a space ship and bear children. The stakes are high, relationships are tense, and the mission is a long one, never to return to Earth.

I liked Kitasei’s exploration of Asuka’s character, from her complicated American and Japanese identity to her insecurities – she never feels good enough to be there, as evidenced by her inability to get pregnant and her lack of a clear role on the ship. At the same time, as an alternate she learns all the workings of the ship and in fact is much more valuable to the crew.

Asuka loves birds, and throughout the book bird behavior is used as a metaphor to describe what is happening on the ship (for example, the cuckoo bird sneaks her own eggs into other birds’ nests so they have to do the work). This reminded me at times of the way Star Trek plays with symbolism to make larger points about humanity.

I also liked the use of alternate reality as a way to keep each crew member feeling good about life on the ship. Each crew member gets to design their own reality to make the ship feel inviting. The trouble is that each character’s reality is different and solitary – so is that keeping each crew member happy or increasing their isolation?

The book felt unevenly paced, slow at times, and the development of the other characters was limited. The book follows two parallel times, the present on the ship and the past in Asuka’s boarding school/training program. I don’t love constant switches back and forward in time and I think the book would have benefitted from more time in the present. I did appreciate the intensity of the competition among the young people forced to compete against each other for limited space on a one-time mission, but I think too much time was spent in the past.

I enjoyed this book but did have some issues with it. I could see it making a great movie or show. If you like space thrillers, you can’t do better than the Planetfall series by Emma Newman. I also recommend Light From Uncommon Stars and The Space Between Worlds if you enjoyed this book.

Thanks to NetGalley and publisher Flatiron Books for this advanced review copy. This book published July 18, 2023.

I really enjoyed this book, and I think Yume did an awesome job for her debut novel! I didn’t love everything, such as the pacing of the book, but I was hooked and the action was great and visually descriptive. Thank you NetGalley for sending me this ARC!

Thanks to NetGalley and Flatiron Books for sending me an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.
~

Wow, I loved this. One of the best sci-fi novels I’ve read all year.

We’ve got a complex, compelling protagonist with trauma that feels genuine rather than overdone, a locked-room mystery on a small colony ship halfway to another planet, and a whole lotta history between the ship’s crew from their very competitive (and very public) multi-year training academy prior to the mission.

I really don’t want to spoil anything, but Asuka is one of the best-written protagonists I’ve read in a while—and from a debut author, nonetheless! Her personal struggles and outsider status compared to rest of the ship allow us truly feel how alone the crew of the Phoenix is on the interstellar journey, how small and fragile their existence is in the crushing darkness of space. I was always engaged in uncovering clues about the explosion in the contemporary narrative, but the flashbacks to life in the training program are expertly crafted too. These kind of flashbacks can feel clunky in other books, but watching the origins of the crew’s myriad interpersonal issues from the contemporary narrative is incredibly compelling. There’s an excellent emotional thread to follow in figuring out just why and how things get to the state we see them in, and it’s so rewarding to eventually get the full picture.

Any flaws there might be here are too small or irrelevant to warrant mention. I loved this, and I’m very excited to see what Yume Kitasei does next.

I picked this up because I’m a huge sucker for spaceship locked room mysteries, and throw in the fact that it’s a generation ship, politics from back home affect what’s going on on the ship, and there’s an AI involved, and you have a really neat setup. I’ve also seen comparisons to Among Us, in that there’s a saboteur onboard and the crew isn’t sure who it is. The story also shuttles nicely between the past and present, explaining how our main got here, and all the interactions with the crew. The mystery itself is well written, and allows the reader to easily follow along. However, what no one seems to have picked up on and seems to have been shuffled a bit to the side narratively is that as a condition of being selected, all the crew are required to bear multiple children, and various crew members are pregnant. The fact that these people had to agree to be impregnated by randomly selected sperm samples feels incredibly dystopian at best, but doesn’t really seem to be picked up on or even seem remarkable to any of the crew members, However, it lines up with billionaire creepiness. Definitely worth a read.

TL;DR

The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei combines a compelling mystery with interesting technology, family strife, and lots of bird facts. This science fiction novel rests on excellent world building and is worth your time. Highly recommended.

Disclaimer: The publisher provided a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Any and all opinions that follow are mine alone.

Review: The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei

The more I contemplate what a generation ship is, the more I learn about how complex and difficult an undertaking it really would be. It really would take a worldwide effort to build, to staff, and to supply. Would the entirety of humanity coming together be enough to succeed, though? I don’t know; there are so many points of failure. Supply, environmental regulation, ecological problems, politics, and the unexpected all present problems. The engineering is the easiest part of the whole endeavor. It’s the human problem that will be the hardest to solve. The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei highlights some of those very human problems the crew of a generation ship would encounter. She presents some intriguing solutions, including using augmented reality, to keeping her humans alive on the journey. Along the way, Kitasei gives readers a look at the social and familial ramifications of sending humans on a one way trip to a distant world.

A generation ship leaves Earth full of people capable of birthing children. They sleep for ten years and then are awoken mid-voyage to begin giving birth. Once the children are old enough, all will return back to cryo-sleep until they arrive. Except during the mid-voyage session, a bomb explodes, killing three people, and sending the ship off course. This is the beginning of The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei. Asuka survived the explosion and is both suspected and tasked to find out what happened. She’s an alternate, meaning she wasn’t originally chosen for the voyage. So, she doesn’t have an exact role. Her job on the ship is to fill in for others and to perform the odd jobs other needs done. Asuka begins investigating; she also ruminates on the past, her life and all that she left behind on Earth.

The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei is a third person novel set partially aboard a generation ship and partially on Earth. For each chapter in space, there’s a flashback chapter prior to the ship’s launch. Kitasei includes a lot of interesting ideas mixed with a compelling mystery. The novel balances plot and character well with enough tension to keep the reader wanting just one more page. Just another one.

A Planet-wide Effort

One of the great bits of world building that Kitasei does in this book is the realization that the entire world would be needed to get a generation ship off the ground. That idea existed before this book, but it’s often shown as something world does out of the good of its heart. In reality, each nation would have its own motivations for contributing, and part of that motivation would be competition against other countries. Kitasei has this generation ship and all the treasure humanity invests in it be one part of the political dynamics of the planet. In fact, once the ship launches, nations go to war. Because humans will be humans even when joined in an effort to save the species.

And because humans will never agree on the correct way to save the species – whatever that is – there will always exist those who disagree and feel hurt by the method chosen. Some of those people will take advantage of that moment to spread their hatred and bigotry. Kitasei depicts Men’s Right Activists and white supremacist groups in her novel as part of the background story. It’s a nice depiction of how humanity would react to a generation ship. Selection for the ship would require discrimination of some sort. Not everyone on the planet can join the ship, and in Kitasei’s world, the first round of discrimination is young, birthing people and not birthing people. Naturally, this would disappoint the non-birthing population. Vultures, grifters, and bigots would – and, in the novel, do – jump on that disappointment to radicalize people toward hatred, fear, and violence. Kitasei builds this into her world as something the people training to be on the ship will experience.
Parents, Loss, and Leaving

Part of the flashbacks are Asuka dealing with her family. Her mother doesn’t want her to apply to the program. She reacts poorly to the anticipated loss of her daughter and ends up losing her daughter really. On board the ship, there’s a real time communication machine that despite the distance from Earth allows the ship to communicate with a reasonable timescale. Yet, Asuka doesn’t reply to any of her mother’s messages. Kitasei does a wonderful job of filling in the mother/daughter relationship such that the reader understands why Asuka cuts off contact while at the same time understanding the consequences a little better than Asuka seems to.

Kitasei lets her characters experience all the emotions associated with leaving. She further complicates this by having the characters wake up ten years after launch. For those aboard the ship, they just left, but for their families, they’ve been gone for ten years. This is a beautiful complication to a complex narrative.

Mystery

Who set the bomb and why is the central mystery. Kitasei does an excellent job with the mystery. It’s compelling. A number of people, organizations, even nations, could have been behind the sabotage. Anyone aboard the ship – even the AI, itself – could be culprit. However, I didn’t like the solution. Now, this could entirely be a me thing, and I hope it is. I enjoyed Asuka investigating the explosion. The flashbacks melded well with the investigation. I think, however, that the focus of the flashbacks pushed me to expect one explanation for the explosion and the actual explanation came out of nowhere. Does this mean too much emphasis was on the red herring? Your mileage may vary. Ultimately, I think a promise was made that went unfulfilled, and it left me wanting. However, it’s possible that I focused on the wrong parts of the story. My predilections, eccentricities, and obsessions might have given more importance to certain parts of the story than the author intended or than another reader. So, this could entirely be a me problem.

In the end, though I was disappointed with the mystery solution, it didn’t affect my enjoyment of the book. Riding along with Asuka on her journey was a joy. It was a small disappointment that won’t stop me from recommending this book. It was an enjoyable read.

Trigger Warning for Conservatives

Kitasei has created a really interesting book full of conservative bogeymen. In her world, humans are free to identify with any gender they want. There exist within the book, non-binary and trans characters. Aboard the ship, she places a trans-man capable of giving birth. Gender neutral pronouns are used with ease and without confusion.

In addition, during the flashbacks, Asuka’s Earth is being ravaged by the effects of climate change. Wars are being fought; humans are displaced; and white supremacy is on the rise – even more so than we’re experience in real life.

It’ll be okay. You’ll be okay.

AI and Augmented Reality

Asuka and her fellow crewmates all have augmented reality interfaces. Basically, they see a computer- or, in this case, AI-generated overlay on top of reality. Each crew member gets their own little version of interface to experience. Asuka sees the interior of the ship as forest that she travels through. The reality of the white walls, floor, and ceiling are replaced by the overlay. However, Auska isn’t immersed in a virtual reality. She can still see other individuals in the ship and interact with the ship. She just sees those interactions differently. Imagine if you were looking through glasses and instead of your home, the background is replaced with a Looney Tunes set. Your family is still there walking around on the same location as Wil E. Coyote. In addition, Asuka can choose how the people around her present themselves within rules set by the other individual. So, if your significant other were wearing that teal polo shirt you hate, your augmented reality could change your vision of the shirt into a white, flowy pirate tunic instead. Provided your partner has rules that allow for that.

Kitasei uses augmented reality beautifully. It takes a bit to get use to what she’s doing with it. But that is quickly overcome, and it becomes an essential part of the crew’s experience. Use of augmented reality would greatly help with the psychological effects of being stuck in one location for years at a time. Humans crave variety, and that will be hard to come by when stuck in a tin can with nowhere else to go. Augmented reality can help diversify the settings and allow the crew to experience different locales to preserve sanity. In effect, this will be a budget version of Star Trek’s holodecks.

To control the ship and implement augmented reality, Kitasei gives the ship artificial intelligence, AI. This is a fully evolved AI – Kitasei doesn’t get into the debate about sentience – that is still under human control. With AI currently everywhere in the news, it’s interesting to see what SF authors pose AI as and what AI really is. Kitasei’s AI is another character that seems to genuinely care about the crew. In reality, AI is just a deck of whatever its trainers fed it. AI can, will, and does lie. It produces falsity in an effort to fulfill requests made of it. In other words, AI, in reality, is a tool without the ability to understand the words it strings together. Kitasei’s AI shows understanding and self awareness. We are decades away from the type of AI Kitasei describes. If we end up evolving AI in any direction, I hope it ends up like the one Kitasei has in her novel.

Conclusion

Yume Kitasei’s The Deep Sky is a fun science fiction novel with some interesting ideas. It brings augmented reality into space travel while looking at the social dynamics of a generation ship program. Likeable characters dealing with leaving loved ones and home behind while trying to survive in deep space makes for an excellent read.

The Deep Sky is a fun and new sci-fi mystery/thriller novel following the main character, Asuka, on a spaceship traveling to a new habitable planet after Earth is no longer suitable. However, halfway through their journey, a bomb goes off killing crew members and throwing the ship off course. Now, Asuka must work to figure out who is responsible for the explosion.

There were a lot of things I did enjoy in this: the deep space atmosphere, the technology in this world, the explanation of different rebellion groups on Earth, the idea of repopulating a new planet, and the very diverse cast.

However, I had a really hard time getting invested in the story and connecting with the characters. Asuka is the main character and she is really the only one you get to know, although there are plenty of side characters throughout. Asuka herself I wasn't really a big fan of, and I didn't really know much about any of the side characters aside from their names so it was just hard to care about any of them really ...🫤

The mystery itself wasn't extremely compelling to me either (probably because I wasn't super invested in the characters).

Overall, The Deep Sky is a fun debut and I would definitely recommend fans of sci-fi to check it out - but this one just didn't work for me 🤷🏼‍♀️

Thanks Net Galley for the eARC of The Deep Sky!

The begining starts a little slow, and we do jump around between the present and the MC's flashbacks, but overall it was a good read. I loved the AI componets of the story, and found that the SciFi parts of the book were fairly easy to follow (should be easily accessible to 'new to SciFi' readers. This is the author's debut novel & I am looking foward to the author's future books, and watching their growth as a writer.

I geek out on sci-fi but don’t read it as much as I should. The Deep Sky has reminded me just how much I LOVE this genre, especially since it was also parts thriller & horror 👩‍🚀

I really vibed with Kitasei’s writing and kept highlighting lines! Books about our near-future life and climate are sometimes too scarily close for comfort (when does it shift from dystopia to reality?), yes, but they’re so important and thought-provoking 🌎

I also really enjoyed the mystery about who planted the bomb, Alpha’s dry humor, and Asuka’s journey to find her identity 🤍

Read this if you like:
• Climate dystopia
• AI, like TARS in Interstellar
• Badass women trying to save the world
• Locked-room mysteries (we’re talking millions of miles into outer space locked) 😳

I love genre-blending books- a space opera, post-apocalyptic adventure, and a thriller mystery all rolled into one? Sign me up. Yume Kitasei is a debut author to boot, but I could barely tell. The pacing was near perfect and the characters jumped off the page. I was enthralled from the first page. This is the perfect mix of timely climate warning, science fiction, and deeply engaging mystery. I couldn’t put it down. Grab this if you’re looking to expand your horizons.
This will be published in the local paper next month.

I was nervous when I first started this book because it ended up being way more science based than I anticipated and I typically struggle with those types of sci-fi stories. But I ended up being able to follow (mostly) what was happening and I ended up really enjoying this sci-fi murder mystery story about a spaceship being sent out to save humanity and the people who don't want it to succeed.

The beginning was a bit slow to get into the story, but once I hit the 30% mark it was pretty smooth sailing and I enjoyed following Asuka as she tried to figure out who had sabotaged their ship and killed three of their crew members. I also really enjoyed the flashback sections leading up to Asuka being chosen as the alternate candidate for the space mission to save humanity. It gave more backstory as to why her and the other characters were making the decisions they were making in the present timeline, their dynamic as a group, and how Earth was becoming uninhabitable.

I couldn't give it the full 5 stars because some of the plot points were never full tied up or explained and while the murder mystery set on a spaceship was really fun to follow and try to solve, it could've been executed better.

Will definitely be checking out Yume Kitasei's future books!

Thank you to NetGalley for the e-arc! All opinions are my own.

This (literally) starts with a bang and keeps running, with great world building helping to make the story feel urgent and some great twists and turns that give this a little bit of a whodunnit feel.

Yume Kitasei’s The Deep Sky is both beautiful and haunting – an ode to the unknowable vastness of the stars and the increasing longing of humanity to travel among them.

Told in alternating flashbacks from present to past, this novel follows the story of main character, Asuka, a young Japanese American woman belonging to an 80-person crew, trained from childhood for this mission among the stars. Asuka’s present is stark, the atmosphere of the story claustrophobic and thick as tensions rise throughout the ship and crew in the wake of an explosion that has knocked them, and possibly their entire mission, off course. When it’s discovered that the explosion has killed two of their crewmates, mounting suspicions add to an already unstable mix of emotions, resulting in the forming of factions among the crew. In an effort to figure out who was behind the attack, Asuka is tasked to investigate both ship and crew.

As Asuka’s investigation plays out, we are treated to flashes of her memories before the crew undertook this journey through space and time – including a bleak picture of life on Earth as climate change continues to contribute to climate catastrophes and natural disasters; the elite program they all joined as young children, the sole purpose of which was to send this crew on a one-way journey to a new planet, a desperate last hope; and the increasingly fraught politics steadily leading to a global conflict. Kitasei shows us in this novel both the hopes and dreams of humanity, as well as humanity’s explosive destructive potential. We see this play out globally in the past and present, through Asuka’s memories, and, on a more intimate scale, among the crew.

The last pages of Kitasei’s novel will leave you with an achy feeling of longing and unbearable hope – for the characters, and for humanity as a whole.

If you enjoy reading psychological thrillers, space thrillers, or love that eerie creeping feeling that comes with the unease of never quite knowing the whole story, I would highly recommend The Deep Sky.

Thank you to Netgalley and Flatiron Books for this digital e-ARC to read in exchange for an honest review.

This great debut novel focus on the near future where our planet faces a complete climate crisis, and a billionaire recruits international teens along with funding from all major nations for a space expedition to bring humanity to a habitable planet. In what feels like an academic and training hunger games with candidate daily ratings, hundreds of potential teens get whittled down to 80. The nations providing the funding getting to pick their delegations. The teen delegates get sequestered to an abandoned small liberal arts campus for their teen years, and powerful friendships as well as enemies form.

Asuka, our half Japanese and half American heroine raised in the United States, competes for a position on Japan’s team. Her Japanese Mom, a climate activist, deeply opposes her going. And humanity seems split on those dedicated to trying to fix Earth and those giving up. Asuka ends up getting selected as a last-minute substitute for a girl who dropped out of the flight, and unlike others gets trained as a generalist to sub in for others during the mission instead of being a specialist.

Controversial issues thread their way throughout the plot: all the women on the flight are expected to bear children from a sperm bank to jumpstart populating the new planet; ramped up geo-political war on Earth between China and the U.S. spills onto the nation-based crew and their two ship leaders who represent each country.

Midway through the space journey, a deliberate explosion kills three members of the crew and knocks the spaceship perilously off course. Asuka, who witnessed the explosion during a spacewalk to identify an unknown object on the outside of the ship, sets out to as the generalist find the saboteur.

Suspects emerge and revelations abound, pulling you into the hunt for the bomber as well as the plight of the ship given its off-course heading.

Looking forward to reading more from Kitasei!!


Thanks to Flat Iron Books and NetGalley for an advanced reader’s copy.

Unfortunately despite an interesting premise and a gripping beginning of the story this book ended up not working for me in the end.

I didn't particularly like Asuka and didn't enjoy being in her mind as the narrator and never found myself invested in her as a character at all. I also didn't find myself interested in any of the other characters. They honestly felt fairly interchangeable and I kept confusing who was who in regards to their relationships with each other. They also, in the current timeline, were supposed to be in their 20s, but the drama on the ship all read as very juvenile still which I did not particularly enjoy.

I was somewhat interested in the whodunnit aspect of the plot, at least enough that I did finish the book instead of DNFing, but overall ended up finding the plot pretty boring for a large chunk of it as I didn't particularly care about the flashbacks since I wasn't attached to the characters at all.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for a free e-arc of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei. It has been a long time since I was drawn to a science fiction novel... dare I say... years. This book was the the perfect one for me to dip my toes back in. I really enjoyed how this story was about so much more than the challenges at hand in space. It covers everything from geopolitics and climate change, to fertility and close relationships. While this book is in many ways a whodunnit, Kitasei does a great job of making that element more of an underlying plot device, rather than the sole focus of the book. Lastly, while I don't know much about birds, I liked how they were used throughout this story to leave clues and give deeper meaning to certain passages. I'm sure a bird enthusiast would get even more out of those passages, but I enjoyed them all the same. I hope to see more from this author in the future!

4.5 stars: this is an absolutely fantastic debut novel. There are great sci-fi elements, environmental collapse, themes of race and belonging, a diverse group of characters, and an interesting mystery.

Asuka is among 80 people sent on a ship to a new planet, a last ditch effort to save humanity after environmental disaster and war. But then, the worst happens and a bomb kills three people, and everyone is left wondering if there’s a traitor among them. Asuka is tasked with getting to the bottom of the mystery.

The story unfolds in the present day after the bomb and flashes back to Asuka’s childhood and the program she went through to be selected for the mission.

Thank you to NetGalley and Flatiron Books!

The sky is certainly deep, and so is this book (although not literally, its probably average length). Characters are really the name of the game in this one.

I wrote about this on The Storygraph and on Goodreads with a link sent to Twitter. Note that I decided to listen to this via audiobook instead of reading. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5711806349