Star Splitter
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
A 2024 Edgar Award Nominee!
Survival and self-determination collide in this haunting, pulse-pounding science fiction novel from Edgar Award–winning author Matthew J. Kirby that spans both space and time.
“An intense, read-in-one-sitting kind of ride.″—Kirkus, starred review
2199. Deep-space exploration is a reality and teleportation is routine. But this time something has gone very, very wrong. Seventeen-year-old Jessica Mathers wakes up in a lander that’s crashed onto the surface of Carver 1061c, a desolate, post-extinction planet fourteen light-years from Earth. The planet she was supposed to be viewing from a ship orbiting far above.
The corridors of the empty lander are covered in bloody hand prints; the machines are silent and dark. And outside, in the alien dirt, there are fresh graves carefully marked with names she doesn’t recognize. Now Jessica must unravel the mystery of the destruction all around her—and the questionable intentions of a familiar stranger.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Space exploration, teleportation, and cloning experiments end in disaster in this heart-pounding thriller by Kirby (A Taste for Monsters). Seventeen-year-old white-cued Jessica Mathers is preparing to teleport to the Theseus, a research facility in orbit around distant planet Carver 1061c, where she will be reunited with her parents, whom she has not seen in six years. In 2199, teleportation involves her body being scanned to an advanced 3-D printer at her destination, upon which its counterpart is destroyed at the point of departure. But instead of emerging on the Theseus, Jessica arrives in a crashed lander on Carver's surface, seemingly alone. Alternating before and after chapters chronicle the events leading to Jessica's appearance on Carver and her struggle to survive in the planet's postapocalyptic landscape. Dual timelines imbued with believable hard science, harrowing action, and strong characterizations permeate Kirby's breakneck adventure. Questions of personhood are skillfully elevated, explored against an inventive future backdrop in which cloning is the norm and the potential consequences of deceptively simple-sounding procedures come at high costs. Ages 12–up.
Customer Reviews
Interesting Take on Teleportation
Jessica does not want to spend a year of her life on a planet in the middle of nowhere as her parents’ research assistant. But they didn’t give her any say in the matter. It’s a year that she has to spend away from her friends and her life on a planet with just the parents who left her six years ago. To get there, she needs to teleport—a process that involves sending quantum data through space and printing a person’s body at their destination, destroying the reference body in the process. Things don’t quite go as planned, however. Upon her arrival, Jessica finds herself on a crashed lander on the planet instead of in orbit nearby. To make things even weirder, the person she’s greeted by…is herself. Jessica needs to find out how exactly she ended up here, why she was printed a second time, and how to get herself home.
I found the premise for this book very novel in how they approached teleportation. Essentially, they create a clone of the person at their destination—which works out fine because the previous version of the person is destroyed in the process of capturing the data that is them. Because of this, Kirby was able to examine what happens when that process is disturbed, and multiple versions of a person are created at different times. I liked this unique approach to space travel, despite the concepts of clone agency being ones that have been played out before.
Conversely, I found most of the characters to be quite flat, boring, and, in some cases, unlikeable. All the characters were seen from a stereotypically sullen teenage girl’s point of view, which made them very flat and didn’t give them much depth. The most interesting character ended up being Duncan, the other teenager on the ship, mostly because she interacted with him the most and actually gave him some slack in her opinions. She, on the other hand, just seemed sullen and mean—even to herself. It made her less than likeable, which definitely colored my reception of the book.
When I was done with this book, I was left with the unfortunate feeling that it didn’t matter. Without giving anything away, at the end of the book, I was left wondering if the events of the book really mattered given how it all ended up playing out. I know that the end was definitely a commentary on the teleportation system, but in the end it made me feel like what I read was kind of a waste of time, especially as I wasn’t terribly enamored with the characters to begin with.
On the whole, I was disappointed with this book. Although it had a very promising and unique premise, I disliked Jessica and didn’t really feel like the story mattered to the fictional universe at the end of the book.