66 pages • 2 hours read
Christopher PaoliniTo Sleep in a Sea of Stars
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Connectedness and Cooperation
At the beginning of To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, Kira inadvertently connects with the xeno for the first time and faces disastrous consequences when she accidentally kills her fiancé, Alan. As she cannot free herself from the xeno, she decides she needs to learn to control it. However, until she is willing to trust the xeno completely, she is not able to fully integrate with it or cooperate to use their combined power to create instead of destroy. In the end, she realizes that when she relinquishes the need to control anything but herself, she and the xeno can cooperate fully—and together are capable of nearly anything.
Kira is terrified of the xeno’s potential and her inability to control it. However, after she injures the Wallfish passenger, Sparrow helps her understand that she needs to control her own emotions because the xeno is merely responding to them. Accordingly, Sparrow designs their training to instruct Kira herself instead of the xeno. After a time, Kira is able to control her emotions, which leads to a shift in her perspective and an acceptance of her limitations: “She wasn’t going to allow herself to get worked up over things she couldn’t change. Not this time. Whatever was going to happen, she’d strive to face it with a sense of self-control” (546). By shifting the need to control from the xeno to herself, Kira is showing a willingness to understand and to learn to cooperate with the xeno.
After this shift occurs, Kira realizes that each time she gains insight into the xeno, she is better able to cooperate with it. Through the xeno’s choices, she gets a sense of its personality, “one that was impulsive and eager to find flaws that could be exploited. Its was a questing consciousness full of unbridled curiosity, despite its oftentimes destructive nature” (345). As that understanding grows, so does her sense of connectedness to the xeno. She discovers the xeno’s true purpose is to grow and heal, so she is able to trust it more, and they become even more deeply connected. They cooperate to heal Gregorovich, and “[c]ompared with before, commanding the Seed was effortless, and she had little fear of losing control. As she willed, so it was.” (720). This true cooperation first begins when Kira sees the xeno as a fully-sentient being. Once this happens, Kira has gone one level deeper in understanding the xeno and her relationship with it. She no longer sees it as just a tool to be used but a being with whom to collaborate.
The final step to full cooperation is Kira giving up control of her own body and allowing the xeno to take over, i.e., she achieves full connectedness. Cooperation necessitates trust and vulnerability, both of which Kira has resisted fully giving to the xeno until now. However, when she is badly injured, she trusts the xeno to heal her: “[S]he willingly surrendered control to the Seed and told it to do what was needed. It had to, because she couldn’t” (738). Kira takes a leap of faith and lets the Seed take over completely, knowing that by healing her so deeply it is more fully and deeply integrating itself with her body. Yet the trust and vulnerability in this decision results in greater connectedness on physical, mental, and emotional levels. By taking this final step, Kira is fully and deeply connected to and cooperating with the Seed at last. This allows them to also absorb the Maw and heal it and to create Unity, both acts that would not have been possible without full cooperation.
By the end of the novel, Kira has fully absorbed the lesson that she cannot control everything: “The missile would either kill her—or it wouldn’t; the outcome was out of her control” (754). Kira has finally learned that by relinquishing the need to control, she has shifted her relationship with the xeno and no longer feels constrained by it or fearful of their connection. She is freer than she has ever been, as she is not bounded by space and able to build, grow, and heal with the Seed since their minds and bodies are now intertwined.
Homeworld Earth
In To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, Earth is no longer the only planet with human inhabitants. However, it is the origin planet of the human species. To most people living outside Sol, Earth’s solar system, the planet is a mythical place, the “ancestral home of humanity” (603). Those from other planets look with awe upon Earth and its neighboring planets: “‘She’s from Venus,’ Trig blurted out, eyes shining” (201). Yet their awe is mixed with discontent at the special treatment afforded Earth by The League.
The League, the organization that governs the conglomerate of human-inhabited planets, often prioritizes Earth and Sol in their decision-making—as Kira notes, The League is always “putting Sol first” (534). Although it is the norm, this special treatment is thrown into relief during the war with the Jellies, as “the bulk of their ships were kept concentrated in and around Sol, to protect Earth” (527). This prioritization is obvious and unapologetic and accepted as appropriate because of Earth’s mythical homeworld status.
Earth is sometimes referred to as the Homeworld, but Kira disagrees with the term, saying, “Technically it was correct, but it just felt oppressive to her, as if they were all supposed to bow down and defer to those lucky enough to still live on Earth. It wasn’t her homeworld. Weyland was” (167). Kira’s resistance to this hierarchy is a common attitude among colonists, yet she also uses Earth’s mythic status to convince Akawe to follow her plan to seek out the Staff of Blue: “She’d said the magic word: Earth. The semi-mythical Homeworld that everyone in the UMC had sworn to protect” (285). Her contention that if she is sent to Sol the Jellies will follow her and Earth will be in danger is the final point in convincing Akawe not to take her there. However, just because Earth is mythologized as the Homeworld does not mean it is a paradise for humans.
Besides being the birthplace of humanity and a political priority for The League, Earth also represents uncontrolled evolution and growth: “A planet swarming with life, and so much of it complex, multicellular organisms far more advanced than those found in most xenospheres” (603). Earth is represented as a boiling mass of life where “plants and animals just existed, mixing and competing in a chaotic mess that still defied attempts at control” (341). It represents a world where humans have no control. This is in marked contrast to the colonized planets where “All macroorganisms [...] had built-in genetic kill switches, to make it easy to manage their population and keep any one organism from disrupting the nascent food chain or, if present, the native ecology” (341). To those from the colonized planets, where growth and evolution are strictly controlled, Earth’s uncontrolled growth is dangerous; as Sparrow says, “It’s a crazy place. Beautiful, but there’s living things wanting to kill you everywhere you go” (331). Earth’s unchecked evolution and growth only add to the mythology of the Homeworld.
When Kira finally sees Earth, her comment is, “To think that all of humanity until just three hundred years ago had lived and died on that single ball of mud. All those people, trapped, unable to venture forth among the stars as she and so many others had been able to” (603). Far from the mythical way it is represented throughout the text, here Kira describes Earth as a “ball of mud” and cannot believe that humanity was trapped on it for so long.
In the novel, Earth has a complicated position in humanity’s development—as the origin of humanity, it is prized, envied, and feared, and its unchecked growth enabled all human development until they began to colonize other worlds and seed those worlds with their own creations. Added to this are the complicated feelings with which those who live elsewhere have toward the preferential treatment Earth receives from The League. All of this contributes to rather than detracts from the mythology of Earth as the Homeworld.
Finding Family
Although this novel is a sprawling, epic space opera, it also deals deeply with Kira’s wants and needs. One feature of her narrative, from beginning to end, is her search for the acceptance, loyalty, and support of family. Kira’s story begins focused on family, as she and Alan become engaged and the narrative explores Kira’s desire to settle down. They make plans to stay on Adra and build a home and family. Kira’s only hesitance is that in doing so they will be far from her mother, father, and sister on Weyland. When Kira accidentally kills Alan with the xeno, that dream disappears, and she is alone, drifting through space in a shuttle while the only other crew members are in cryo.
When the Wallfish picks Kira up, it is evident almost immediately that the crew are truly a family. Paolini makes this clear from their introduction, with Trig, “thin and gangly [...] looked to be in his late teens,” being the first crew member Kira meets (146). Captain Falconi’s crew is a diverse collection of humans from all walks of life, but their bond is clear to Kira when she joins them in the galley for dinner. The crew members are comfortable with each other, eating and bickering like a family, and Kira is introduced to their pet cat and pig. The presence of the animals and their names (Mr. Fuzzypants and Runcible, respectively) show a relaxed, humorous atmosphere. As Falconi himself says, “[Runcible] is part of the crew, same as Mr. Fuzzypants, and they get the same rights as any of you” (201). The Wallfish crew are a ragtag family, and Falconi’s comment makes it clear that being a part of the family, no matter who you are, means full acceptance.
When the crew accepts her, Kira gains the family she craves, but the xeno and her difficult relationship with it threaten her place on the Wallfish. After she accidentally injures a passenger, Kira stays in her cabin, unable to face the crew, ashamed of her actions, and afraid that they will fear her. However, Nielsen comes to her cabin and encourages her to come to the galley, telling her, “‘Everyone messes up. How you deal with it is what determines who you are’” (311). The crew is understanding and loyal, and once she is a part of their family, they accept her fully. In another example, when Falconi asks her if she can control the xeno and she admits she cannot, he does not turn her away, even though the xeno could present life-threatening danger. Instead, he directs Kira to work with Sparrow to learn to control the xeno, offering her a solution instead of ostracizing her. Sparrow, too, treats her like family, putting herself at risk to help Kira understand her relationship with the xeno. At last, Kira has found the family she has been craving and only leaves the Wallfish crew when it becomes clear that it is the best way to ensure their safety.
In the end, Kira makes the decision to hunt the Maw’s clones alone as a way of protecting the Wallfish crew. She knows that she can best show her love and support by leaving, and in doing so she appears to deny herself the family for which she has been longing. However, Kira is not always alone, and she has not been forgotten by her family. Paolini ends the novel with the Wallfish’s quick visit to Kira as she travels. Falconi stays just long enough to inform her that her family on Weyland is well. Kira has fulfilled her goal of having a family, or rather, two families now, in a way she could never have anticipated.
Though Kira seems to have sacrificed both of her families at the conclusion of the novel, the truth is that her understanding of existence has been expanded now that she has merged fully with the Seed and the Maw. Though she can no longer have a conventional human family, what she has found is the enlightened understanding that all life comprises a vast family.
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