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Steal Across The Sky (2009)

by Nancy Kress(Favorite Author)

3.42 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0765319861 (ISBN13: 9780765319869)

languge

English

genre

Science Fiction

publisher

Tor

review 1: I wonder how many people see the opening about aliens advertising on the internet, and pick up this book thinking it will be funny? It's not. It is very interesting, and parts of it are moving. Aliens show up, wanting to atone. They take volunteers to visit two other planets, where they will learn what the aliens need to atone for. It's difficult to talk about the book after that, without spoilers. There's mortality, loss, and politics.
review 2: Kress' Steal Across the Sky can be thought of as a book with two separate parts. In the first part, aliens choose individual humans from earth to travel across the stars to other alien planets, and Witness (capital W) the crime that the aliens performed on humanity. This part of the novel does some culture-building, ... morewith Lucca going to a planet with simple, nomadic people, and Cam going to the nearby planet that features a more medieval society that revolves around around skillful manipulation of a game similar to chess (think Iain M. Banks' Player of Games). In the second half, we return to Earth, to see human society deal with the fallout of the aliens' revelation: millenia ago, they altered the human race so we lost the ability to see the spirits of the recent dead. The second half follows the lives of four Witnesses post-Witnessing as the people of earth react to the knowledge that life after death is a certainty. Neither of the worlds in the first half are particularly original, and that's probably a deliberate choice on Kress' part. But it's still rather jarring when things return to Earth; thematically, a chapter that started on Earth may have helped with the transition. The plot in the second half also seems to drift somewhat, and the ending fails to answer certain questions, such as: why did the aliens bother to take people to planets with other humans without the ability to see the dead, when that's all they wanted people to learn? Why did they bother to take them there at all, when they could have just told them? It's a little deus ex alien, and even the hint of a sequel (which there isn't, really) doesn't fix that. On the positive side, Kress does a great job depicting the varying perspectives of her characters, and the asides between chapters showing press clippings and ads and other media on earth go a long way to selling the larger human reaction to the news of the aliens. While the book itself isn't great, Kress wrote this well enough that I'd be interested in reading more from her. less

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