James Nicoll Reviews

Yume Kitasei’s 2024 The Stardust Grail is a stand-alone space opera.

Maya Hoshimoto was an alien artifact retrieval expert (thief); she gave it up, she thought, to re-enter academia. At the advanced age of thirty-one, she finds herself at a standstill. Where once Maya was a junior scholar failing to reach her potential, then a thief, now she is a not very successful comparative cultures graduate student in the ​“death spiral” phase of her research career.

Maya may think she has left her old life behind her. Her old life seeks her out in Princeton, New Jersey.

But first, alien galactopolitics.

Centuries before, Lithians, a militant clan of the Belzoar, targeted the Frenro for annihilation. While Frenro survive, the long-lived aliens lost the ability to reproduce for reasons unclear to humans. Key to restoring that ability are devices known as grails, something the Lithians took particular pains to seek out and destroy. Maya’s Frenro friend and former business partner, Auncle, is determined to find a grail and until certain unpleasant events transpired, so was Maya. But that was her former career…

Imagine Maya’s surprise when Auncle reappears in her life. Imagine her further surprise when a book that may be key to finding a grail turns up in the latest shipment of artifacts shipped to Princeton University. Maya immediately understands the significance of the book and, reverting to former habits, steals the book and heads off with Auncle in search of the grail.

The grail’s location isn’t as simple as an x on a star map. A comprehensive search will be difficult if not impossible, as the clues lead towards the Belzoar worlds. There, Maya and Auncle are wanted criminals (they inadvertently spread a plague that killed several thousand Lithians). Lithians have many virtues but forgiveness is not one of them.

Why grails are important: the interstellar web that allows faster-than-light travel was built by the Frenro. For centuries the network has survived despite the near-extinction of the Frenro. Now nodes are vanishing. Without the nodes, the human-settled worlds will be isolated from each other and from Earth. The Coalition of the Nations of Earth is determined to stop the network decay.

Key to saving the network? Why, the same grail that Maya and Auncle are desperate to find.

~oOo~

Grail is a space opera, which is to say the scale is vast, the stakes are high, and both space travel and space combat are depicted in ludicrously unrealistic ways. I had issues with the author’s grasp of space travel in her first book, but this book descends to Star Wars levels of pseudoscience.

There’s also the matter of the plot. Things are set in motion because Maya did not stop to ask a number of pertinent questions about grails, Fenro, nodes, etcetera. The consequences of her rush to action are severe. Is this implausible in a graduate student? She should have learned to ask obvious follow-up questions or to cross-check her sources. In part this is a matter of plot convenience: if characters didn’t do stupid things, there might be no plot. But I think that this could just be the author telling us that Maya is a terrible scholar. Maya may be knowledgeable about things that interest her, but she lacks interest in doing boring but necessary work. This is characterization, not the author palming cards¹.

It is also possible that Maya is not a free agent, at least not to the degree she believes she is. Her devotion to Auncle goes beyond reasonable loyalty, which given some of the revelations about the Frenro, suggests that perhaps Maya’s feelings have been augmented by her well-meaning chum.

Indeed, I was struck by the resemblances between Maya and the Fenro. Both are outgoing, friendly, and sincerely believe they mean well. Both leave prodigious trails of collateral damage in their wake, about which they feel kind of bad, but not so bad they plan on stopping any time soon. Grail would have been a much darker novel had it been written from anyone else’s point of view.

Some readers might wonder if the author is trying to make a point about people and cultures that interfere without any consent from the interferee or any deep knowledge of the situation. An upsetting question for nations like the US, the UK, France and so many others. Fortunately I am a Canadian and this problem has nothing to do with me.

If I were to set my known issues with handwaving re space travel aside, I would say that this was a reasonably fast-paced, competently written space opera featuring an endearing but extremely unreliable narrator and protagonist. I particularly appreciated that Grail is stand-alone, a complete book in and of itself. It is heartening to note at least one SF author whose first two books are stand-alones, which makes them an oddity in the current SF market.

The Stardust Grail is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Apple Books), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: Because the focus is on Maya, it’s hard to say if anyone else has asked questions like ​“What reason did the Lithians give for attacking the Frenro?” I do notice that Earth is consistently paranoid about the supposedly friendly Frenro.

Speaking of Earth, I am not sure why the CNE is so determined to retain interstellar travel. The aliens known to them are more powerful and include in their number cultures that will exploit or exterminate weaker civilizations. The CNE very nearly found itself at war with one. The human colonies have disloyally formed their own government. How do the benefits outweigh the risks?

I often ask the same question about Star Trek. How did the Federation look at the Five-Year Mission’s logs, filled with encounters with all-powerful aliens, actual gods, deadly space phenomena, and the occasional wandering Berserker, and conclude that what the Federation needed was even more outreach?