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Review - The Scientist, The Spaceman, and the Stars Between Them

Cross-posted on goodreads.

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

I give this book a 2.5/5, rounded up to 3.

Temple and London Davies attempt to hold on to one another in the aftermath of a world-ending cataclysm. But on the ships that are supposed to be humanity's last salvation, there lives something that may just be beyond human understanding. And it is angry.

I wanted to love this book. The characters and their relationships are interesting, as is the setting, and the author was clearly passionate. There are some beautiful bits of prose in here, especially towards the very end, and I truly appreciate what the author was intending to do. However, there were issues throughout the entirety of the book which severely impacted my enjoyment of it.

To start with, the writing itself. The style was fine, at times beautiful, but the way the story was told was a problem for me. The author went for third-person omniscient for this story, and the point of view often switches between multiple characters. This isn’t by itself a problem, but the switches happen seemingly at random, sometimes even within the same paragraph, and it can be confusing as to whose eyes we’re seeing through at any given time. We’re also given the perspective of characters who do little in the story itself, in ways I found didn’t expand upon the characters or work for the impact of the plot.

I also don’t think that the starting point for the book did the story justice. We’re dropped into the story after both the main characters are already broken people, already in a futile situation not of their own making. This had a chance to be extremely interesting, but the way we’re told how they got here was a bit disappointing to me. We’re told the past terrible things that have happened to these characters, told how they used to be, told so many things, but we’re often not actually SHOWN any of it. So many important plot points are told after the fact without exploring them as full, fleshed-out scenes. In some cases this works – the two main characters reminiscing about their first meeting, for example. But I feel like the first half of the story would have been so much more impactful if we’d been given more context. Yes, we know that London is heavily traumatized and very sad and lonely, but specifically why should we care if that’s the only facet of this character we’ve been allowed to see? How much of a gut-punch would it be to see how far Temple and London’s relationship has deteriorated, had we ever been shown what it was like before all of the hardships?

The pacing is also a bit off-putting. The first half of the book is very slow, which personally I wouldn’t have minded nearly as much had the above problems been addressed. The second half of the book has a faster pace but more than that it actually has characters interacting in meaningful ways, which gives their relationships more depth and makes the reader more interested in what may happen.

Finally, the themes. At the end of the story (light spoilers) there’s a lot of talk about the toll humanity is taking on the ecosystem, and about nature taking over its rightful place in the universe. But again, this doesn’t really land because we aren’t actively shown in which ways humanity has been destructive in-universe. Yes, we’re told that the main characters are drilling/mining resources from planets after the death of Earth, but we never really see what that looks like. And because we’re never given snapshots of how beautiful the natural world was for our main characters before the story started, it all sort of falls flat to me.

To sum up, I feel like this story failed to live up to its potential. There were interesting ideas and characters here, and some quality writing as well, but I think all of this was really hindered by the decision to start the story so near the “end” of all of these events. Still, I will still think of this story, and I am glad I read it. And a side-note: as a nonbinary person I really appreciated seeing a main character go by they/them pronouns.