The Deep Sky (2023) is Yume Kitasei’s first novel, and a nominee for Best Science Fiction that year on Goodreads. It’s a fascinating blend of true science fiction, with the exploration of space, and locked-room mystery/thriller–I was completely hooked!
Told from the perspective of Asuka, daughter of a Japanese woman and an American man, who is one of the 80 young women on the spaceship Phoenix, who were chosen from hundreds who started in the grueling EvenStar program when they were twelve years old. She is the only survivor in a spacewalk accident that kills 3 crew members, including the captain. Turns out the accident was a bomb that blasted a hole in the ship, and now she is a suspect, and the new captain asks her to investigate without raising the suspicions of everyone else.
The crewmembers have only been conscious for less than a year, as they were put into a deep sleep for the first ten years of the voyage, and each one is expected to give birth during the remainder of the voyage to populate the new planet. Several, including the new captain, are heavily pregnant. Each crewmember has had a chip implanted so they can experience DAR, or digitally augmented reality, so it doesn’t feel like they’re on a ship hurtling through deep space most of the time. Also, the ship’s AI, Alpha, is omnipresent, and does things like remind them to get sleep and exercise, and therapy if needed.
Because they are so far away, they only have digital communications with Earth, but the tensions on Earth between countries do make it to the Phoenix because the different contributing countries received corresponding placements for crewmembers, so the crew represents the entire world. Asuka hasn’t communicated with her mother since she woke up, and she really doesn’t want to, as her mother was part of a group that opposed the EvenStar project and the Phoenix, and she didn’t want Asuka to go. The narrative goes back and forth between Asuka’s investigations in realtime and flashbacks to their time at Evenstar Academy and the friendships that were made there with girls that became crewmembers and those that either dropped out or didn’t make it.
As Asuka investigates the bomb and who might have set it, and for what reason, needing to find out becomes more critical, as the bomb pushed the Phoenix off course. And then Asuka questions what is reality and what isn’t. Was Alpha the problem and the source of the bomb? How would they know, if all of them have an AI chip implanted?
It was also weight-neutral, although there was discussion of exercise requirements during the EvenStar program, and the candidates had to have extensive medical examinations. Luckily there was no discussion of candidates or crewmembers’ weights or body size.
Reading While Fat 