A perfectly reasonable space adventure
Some books do exactly what they say they will do, and nothing more. The Stardust Grail is one of those. Its hook has all the right trimmings to beguile the willing reader: a graduate student protagonist, a reformed thief, multiple heists, androids who want to be human, wormholes, ex-soldiers with fancy armour-tech, squid-tentacle aliens, hive minds, shady organizations, plagues, and ray guns. All these components are woven together into a quest narrative for a MacGuffin whose recovery spells the difference between survival and extinction, and indeed the fate of galactic civilization. It’s practically a paint-by-numbers example of a sci-fi space adventure. This is not to say that it’s bad. It’s just not particularly surprising.
Our main character, Maya Hoshimoto, used to be a thief for hire, travelling around the galaxy with her partner Auncle, a member of the dwindling alien species known as the Frenro. Together they made a reasonably satisfactory living stealing cultural artifactes for clients, until Maya decides that she wants to build a different life for herself, and returns to graduate school in… cultural xeno-anthropology? Something like that. The specific field of study is never named, but it’s one that involves examining alien cultural artifacts, which her practical stealing experience has equipped her to understand very well. (Readers with experience in academic publishing are encouraged to skim past the bit where Maya’s academic advisor tells her to write an entire article for submission to a prestigious journal in the space of two days, and her research consists of getting a librarian who is entirely unconnected to the project to select some books on the right general topic for her.)
One day, the special collections library where Maya works receives a bequest containing a lost volume of the journal of Dr. Huang, a wildly famous human space explorer from the previous century. The same day, a visiting researcher, Dr. Garcia, approaches Maya and reveals that the entire transportation web of wormhole-flavoured nodes that ties the galaxy together is breaking down. He further reveals that he knows about her criminal past, and threatens her with exposure unless she helps him and the fascist-leaning organization he works for track down a MacGuffin referenced in Dr. Huang’s journal, which for Reasons is the only hope of restoring the transportation web. And, to complete the trifecta of inciting incidents, Auncle returns, and begs for Maya’s help recovering the same missing MacGuffin, which can not only create new nodes, but also an object that is essential for the Frenro’s ability to reproduce. Behold, an ethical dilemma: save the entire galactic civilization from utter collapse, or save the Frenro species from extinction?
As ethical dilemmas go, this is a pretty good one, in part because it avoids the more common plot-driving dilemma structure, which pits smaller, personal obligations against much larger societal stakes. Typically, we get protagonists agonizing over questions like Do I stay home with my family or answer my country’s call and do one last spy mission for the good of AMERICA? Or Do I obey commands and do my duty or do I give up everything, abandon the mission, and rescue my best friend/beloved? These personal-vs-big-stakes dilemmas are common in fiction, because they make the protagonist’s dithering believable while still making it possible to enforce a narratively correct decision. But precisely because the narratively correct answer is obvious, the dithering gets awfully tiresome to the reader. Of course you’re going to abandon your family for one last job, otherwise there won’t be a plot! Or: Of course you’re going to abandon the mission and rescue your friend, otherwise we’ve wasted chapters and chapters of backstory about why your friendship is so important! Quit Hamleting about, unholster your raygun, and go kick some betentacled tushes!
[pant pant pant] Sorry, got worked up there. Anyway, the point is: Maya’s dithering is not frustrating, because both sides of her dilemma are personal and also carry genuinely huge stakes. On the one hand, recovering the MacGuffin to restore the Frenro’s ability to reproduce is personal because Auncle, Maya’s dearest friend in the world, is Frenro, and desperately wants to raise children. If she recovers the MacGuffin and turns it over to Dr. Garcia, she is destroying her best friend’s chances for reproducing, which is a terrible betrayal. She’s also causing an entire species to go extinct. That’s a heckuva bad outcome on both levels.
On the other hand, rebuilding the galactic transportation network is personal to Maya, because she is living on Earth and her family are living on a different planet. The breakdown of interstellar travel means she will never see her family again. It’s also huge stakes because, remember, the entire galaxy depends on this network. If it continues to break down, all worlds will end up isolated, and not all worlds are self-sufficient. Entire planetfuls of people may die. The urgency of this all is rather nicely backed up by a resonance with Maya’s own personal history. Her childhood was marked by scarcity that is an inherent part of trying to subsist on a colony planet where humans did not evolve. Everything was made even more difficult by a horrific disease that swept through the galactic civilization, killed many, and left others—including Maya—struggling with permanent consequences. (This is a 2024 publication. The covid-coding is not a coincidence, I'm sure.) Quarantines were instituted; people starved. Maya therefore knows firsthand the devastation wrought by a much smaller version of this looming total isolation. That is another heckuva bad outcome associated with losing interstellar travel.
So: on the whole, the character motivations, interstellar politics, and betentacled aliens are all very competently accomplished. Maya’s dithering is not frustrating, precisely because there is no good outcome. There is no choice she can make that satisfies either personal or societal constraints. But precisely because there is no good outcome, in a book that is not intended to be any kind of grimdark, it also became clear before the halfway mark that there was only one way the dilemma could be resolved without betraying the entire value system the book presented to us.
This book delivers on everything it says on the tin. But it doesn’t deliver anything more. And at the end, when I arrived exactly where I had predicted hundreds of pages earlier, I found myself wondering whether all those museum heists were really necessary to get there.
Nerd coefficient: 7/10. An enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws.
Highlights:
- Believable dilemmas
- Tentacled aliens
- Overpowered MacGuffins
- Lore
Reference: Kitasei, Yume. The Stardust Grail [Flatiron Books 2024].
CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social
