To Sleep in a Sea of Stars

Christopher Paolini is not a superb writer: he sucks at world building, at character development, at avoiding trope over trope from the genres he touches or sometimes rips.. ehm.. gets inspired from (coughexpansecough).

But he's great at storytelling.

This book is a mix of extremely trite “sci-fi on a ship” aspects (the characters are carbon copies of all the usual stereotypes, and interact much the same way), and thinly veiled fantasy epic settings (replace orcs with aliens and the wilderness with space), but the story keeps you hooked from the moment it gets going. The way things happen and don't happen, develop and regress make for a very enjoyable reading, and decidedly a notch above the level of “bad writers”.

Is this a great book by the standards of “good sci-fi” (whatever that might mean to each of us)? Maybe not. Is it on par with the Eragon serie? Very much so: if you enjoyed that, you'll like this book very much. (And if in general you don't read a lot of sci-fi/fantasy, then you won't recognise where many of the ideas are coming from, and you'll enjoy this all the more.)