Reading The Scourge Between Stars by Ness Brown

“The Scourge Between Stars”, what a great title! Instantly gave me instant cosmic horror vibes.

Here’s how it starts:

The Sun was a golden stitch in the black tapestry of the void, just one needlepoint among thousands visible through the Calypso’s observation deck window.

Err what? To me a tapestry looks like this wool tapestry that is being sold on Novica.com:

It made an extra zag in the sawtooth constellation of Cassiopeia, even though the ship had left Proxima b a century ago.

Now, Voyager was only 6 billion kilometres from Earth, or 333 light minutes away, when it took a picture of the Earth; the famous The Pale Blue Dot photo:

Unfortunately, Voyager did not take a picture of the Sun. Anyway, Proxima b is probably referring to Proxima Centauri b, which is about 4.2 light years away, and it sounds like the ship is somewhere between there and Earth, as the ship left Proxima b a century ago. The closest image I could find of what that would look like is this image of what the Sun would look like from Alpha Centauri, a triple star system which Proxima Centauri b is a part of, and which is 4.3 light years away:

From the ‘W’ of Cassiopeia and the extra zag the Sun makes, it seems like this would be really close to what was being described in the book. I’m not really sure if that’s to scale, but I’ve got no idea how or why that would look like a tapestry and how the Sun looks like a stitch.

The Sun should be blinding by now, the biggest thing in the sky, but Jacklyn still needed the ship’s astronautical charts to tell which star it was. Which star was home.

The observation deck was dark. Infrared sensors could see her sitting against the deck’s pressure glass, just a few inches from the vacuum of space, but she had been doing calculations in her head for long enough that motion detectors had forgotten her and reserve lighting had blinked off to conserve power. The math was bleak.

None of the ward representatives at today’s briefing had liked her results either. Reclamation couldn’t divert any more water to Orion Ward; Foodstuffs couldn’t violate rations for Cygnus Ward. Jacklyn had crunched the numbers for them, but the reps still expected her to hand over resources the ship didn’t have. Only a few of them had appreciated her invitation to go back to Proxima b and get more themselves.

Their forebears had taken only fifty years to sail from their burning home world to the false promise of a new start. At their current hamstrung pace, Jacklyn’s crew would take centuries. They had two miserable choices: limp backward to surely meet death, or crawl forward and maybe prolong it.

Neither option had yet pulled ahead. Jacklyn wanted to ask for the consensus of the Tiamat or the Pele, but Comms hadn’t made contact with the other ships in the Goddess Flotilla in months. They hadn’t heard from the rest of the fleet in much longer. They would have to make their own graves.

Now, this is great. It’s showing her thought process and I get what problem she is facing.

Recycled air from the deck’s vents blew across Jacklyn’s nape, raising the wiry hairs there. The prickling sensation pulled her out of her thoughts and into the sudden clench of hyperawareness. She strained her ears, but the only sounds on the deck were the humming of the grav system and the metallic groaning of a tired spaceship a few decades away from decay. Right as she considered waving an arm to trigger the lights, a voice whispered in the darkness right next to her.

This is where it gets a bit hard for me to read. The air raised the hair on her nape, but why? I guess it was cold since that is the only reason I can think of that air would raise someone’s hair.

“Jack.”

Jacklyn flinched, jerking her hands up. The motion made light flood the deck, blinding her.

Artificial breath puffed against her ear. “It’s only me.”

Jacklyn didn’t relax. She blinked iridescent spots out of her eyes and gritted out, “I told you to quit sneaking up on me, damn it.”

To me, this is just a series of actions. She didn’t relax. She blinked. She gritted out. But why didn’t she relax? Was she not in the mood? She had just been thinking of the ship’s impending doom after all. Maybe she doesn’t like being sneaked up on?

“I’m sorry.” Watson’s voice modulated regretfully. Its glowing blue eyes stared back at her without blinking where it crouched beside her.

What does “modulated regretfully” even mean? More importantly, what is Jacklyn’s reaction to that?

Jacklyn suppressed a shudder and pushed her braids back with the beanie she had taken off to think. “What do you want?”

Apparently, her reaction was to shudder. Again I have no idea why. For all I know, she shuddered because of the cold air from the vents. Then she pushed her braids back with a beanie. I’m imagining her holding a beanie with one hand and pushing her braids back with that hand, but who does that instead of using the hand that isn’t holding anything? Instead of irrelevant details like these, I’d rather know what she thinks of Watson.

Unfortunately for me, the whole book is written like this; at a great distance from Jacklyn’s mind. Here are a few examples from the next page:

The sight of Otto’s space-pale hand against its artificial skin, the same color as Jacklyn’s, rankled. That he had given it his own name rankled worse.

What’s wrong with Watson having dark skin like Jacklyn’s (I’m assuming that’s her on the cover)? Otto is a scientist type who created Watson and his full name is apparently Otto Watson. It’s a bit weird to name a droid he created with his own last name, sure, but why does it “rankle” Jackyln? At this point I would call Jacklyn a misanthrope, except that Watson is not human so that doesn’t really fit. Is there a word for someone who hates everything? Even worse, she hates everything for no discernible reason at all.

In the next paragraph, Otto touches Watson in this manner:

He tapped Watson’s temple with a bony knuckle, right beside the crack that split its faceplate from brow to chin.

Which makes Jackyln react so:

Jacklyn was almost too irked by the touch to parse the implications.

Why was she irked by Otto tapping Watson on its temple? What are the implications? I don’t understand any of this.

Otto’s lips pursed at the interruption. “Watson is the most advanced post-zettascale system ever constructed.” He didn’t have the decency, as its creator, to blush as he said so.

I don’t understand Jacklyn. If someone had built “the most advanced post-zettascale system ever constructed”, whatever that means, why would they be embarrassed enough to blush? On the contrary, I would imagine that person being proud of their achievement.

“It’s about as difficult for her to ingest the data as it is for you and me to take a biscuit with our coffee.”

Jacklyn hated when he gave the droid pronouns.

Why would she hate Otto calling Watson ‘her’? Later on, she enjoys making Otto scowl. Why? Without any insight into Jacklyn’s thought process, I can only conclude that she is equivalent to an internet troll who enjoys getting a rise out of other people.

The book doesn’t get any better for me from this point on. It’s like it was written like a movie; Jackyln does this and Jacklyn does that. But books aren’t movies and the author ignores the biggest strength of books, which is the ability to lay bare the inner workings of a character. I gave the book ★✰✰✰✰ on Goodreads because this book was written in this distant way that made it impossible for me to get into the character’s head and see this literary world through their eyes.

There are 101 ★★★★★ reviews, 227 ★★★★✰, 152 ★★★✰✰, 52 ★★✰✰✰ and 7 ★✰✰✰✰ as of when this was written. This means that ★✰✰✰✰ make up 1.3% of all reviews, ★★✰✰✰ 9.6%, ★★★✰✰ 28.2%, ★★★★✰ 42.1% and ★★★★★ 18.7%. This is similar but not the same as the distribution of ratings.

Meanwhile, the ★★★★✰ and ★★★★★ reviews are gushing about how they love the Jacklyn character. What is going on? What is there to love? Are they projecting their own character motivations and thoughts onto a series of actions that Jackyln did? How are they doing this? Is this what is meant by “reading between the lines”?

All I can say is that if your reading style is similar to mine, you probably won’t enjoy this.

Now, onto SPOILER TERRITORY. Do not proceed past this point if you care about spoilers and haven’t read the book.

SPOILER WARNING

A few pages later:

Jacklyn exited the lift on the command quarters deck. She almost regretted storming out of Data, but just thinking about Otto going through the ship’s salvaged metal and choosing a face for his pet droid that Jacklyn had known and loved made her stomach clench again.

Whose face is it? We only learn this in Chapter 8 out of 9, nearly the end of the book:

“Jack,” Watson said, sounding plaintive. “I’m sorry.”

Jacklyn sobbed. This was a face that she did know. It wasn’t the exact plate that Kimberly had started wearing after the engagement that ruined her real face, but it was the same model—the same shape, the same color. And it had the same effect on Jacklyn.

I think the author thought that this revelation might explain Jacklyn’s behaviour earlier in the book where she got rankled and stuff, but Watson isn’t using Kimberly’s face, only a similar face plate (which I imagine is something like a helmet?), which makes her behaviour even more unreasonable. Was her whole beef with Otto down to him using the same model and color faceplate that her sister had used? He probably didn’t even know! What a petty woman! And why was this revealed only at the end of the book? A reasonable person would have had noticed the similarity and had an emotional reaction right at the start of the book. In this case, it is more than a hundred pages between Jackyln being spooked by Watson and having the appropriate emotional reaction. Talk about ‘distant’ writing!

Let’s move on to another incident where I was taken completely out of the story.

“Jack!” The Comms officer made a strange noise. “We’re picking up something.”

Jacklyn practically teleported to their station. They had tried detecting signals in the middle of engagements before, but up until Otto’s recent breakthrough they had recorded only space noise, their primitive equipment too far behind the apparent galactic standard to help.

At first I thought that there was a typo in “Jacklyn practically teleported to their station.” Who are “they”? Perhaps “they” are the command group on the bridge. “They had tried detecting signals”, “they had recorded only space noise”, “their primitive equipment”, all seem to mean the group of people on the bridge. So maybe the author had meant “Jacklyn practically teleported to her station.”

However, some paragraphs later:

It took only seconds to contain the blaze, but the damage had been done. The console was ruined, and its officer was rolling on the ground, clutching their face and shouting.

Oh, “they” referred to the Comms officer. Now, I’ve got no problem with the singular “they”. What I’ve got a problem with is using the singular “they” when it might be confused for the plural version. The author, or perhaps it’s the editor, should have made it clear which “they” they were using, so that readers are not taken out of the story when they realise they had been reading with the wrong “they”.

There are more singular theys scattered throughout and I don’t remember much about them, so either they were used correctly and it was clear that they were singular theys, or they could have been read as a plural they as well and I misunderstood the author’s intentions. But I found the most problematic singular “they” at the very end of the book, in the About The Author section:

NESS BROWN is a speculative fiction author by day and astrophysicist by night. They are a proud New Mexican living in New York City (and missing green chile) with their husband and two cats, Faust and Mephi. They are currently studying graduate astrophysics after several years of teaching astronomy and encouraging students to wonder about worlds beyond our own. The Scourge Between Stars is their debut.

This usage of “they” irks me to no end, because if you want to use the singular “they”, you’ve got to follow the rest of English grammar and use “they is”, not “they are”. Is their husband (and two cats?) also studying graduate astrophysics? Probably not the cats since cats can’t teach astronomy. Sure, it’s quite unlikely that the husband is also studying graduate astrophysics after several years teaching astronomy, but it’s not impossible.

“They is a proud New Mexican” and “They is currently studying graduate astrophyics” would have prevented any possible confusion.

The author also stated that they finished the story in a little under a month. It shows. This reads like an early draft where some ideas were put in but not fully fleshed out. There is a whole thread about not opening the door, which is even the tagline of the book, but in the end it is not clear what door they is talking about.

Take for example this section where Watson cries out, “It’s coming through the door. We have to close it. Close it—!” Then Watson lunges for the Comms station, punches it until it explodes, and the Comms officer gets injured.

Besides this incident, there are multiple instances of Watson stating that some “they” is opening “the door”, not a door but the door. There is even a mysterious message from the captain of another ship saying “Please. Don’t open the door.”

But what door? The titular scourge between stars can only refer to the alien creatures from Proxima b and the only door they can open are physical ones. And if the door is just some physical door, then Watson wrecking the Comms station makes absolutely no freaking sense because how the hell would that stop a physical creature from opening a physical door? Even then, why would it be the door instead of a door?