I managed to rate Tim Pratt's previous book (The Wrong Stars) 3.5 stars, despite some serious issues I had with the book. I did not feel that those issues, specifically the unnecessary focus on a homosexual relationship, was as much an issue here.

The Axiom is the name for an ancient alien race that are currently in a deep hibernation. They've set some automated systems in place to watch over the galaxy, which humanity has recently had contact with. The desire to meet with and hopefully learn from this ancient race is contrasted with the information that when the Axiom wake, they will kill us all.

In deep space, Captain Callie Machedo and her crew of <em>White Raven</em> discover a unique swarm of nano-particles that are 'eating' and converting everything in their path into 'computronium' - everything, including human flesh. While investigating this threat and looking for ways to save some colonists, Machedo and crew discover one of the Axiom's hibernation locations.

An untrustworthy member of the crew, Sebastien, wakes from his medically induced coma and tells Callie that due to his improved brain functions, he could derail the nanoswarm but he would need to be hooked up to the Axiom's equipment. Sebastien's already been co-opted by the Axiom, and letting Sebastien into their hibernation facilities could wake the dangerous sleepers. On the other hand, doing nothing is as good as signing the death warrant for billions as the nano-particles continue on a path toward civilizations.

I really appreciated Pratt's not dwelling on relationships where it wasn't necessary (clearly some of it is, especially now, given Sebastien's strong role). And the threat level here, immediate and long-range, is about as high as it gets. When reading space opera, you want elevated stakes. I really liked the tension that was built here.

And yet ... something is still missing for me. I wish I could put my finger on it, but I'm just not fully engaged. The book moves just a bit too slow for me. In a space opera I want to be left breathless. My head should be spinning from everything that is going on, and that just isn't happening here.

There's a lot of good content here, but it falls just a tad short of being truly exciting fiction.

Looking for a good book? <em>The Dreaming Stars</em> by Tim Pratt is good space opera, but it isn't yet great space opera.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

When describing a new book (OK, not that new, it dropped in September 2018) from an author you may not know, it’s often tempting to compare it to existing works in a mashup. I will lapse into that weak expedient – the Axiom series is a like a Firefly crew with the big, bad Alliance replaced by the secretive Axiom super-race spiced it up with an alien and augmented humans, and has the fate of the universe resting on the capable and endearing shoulders of Callie and her crew. [Full disclosure: I received a copy of The Dreaming Stars from Netgalley for an honest review].
The Dreaming Stars takes all that we love about The Wrong Stars (read this first, if you haven’t already) and builds on it. All of the core characters are well developed and mostly likable so that you quickly come to care for them. The relationships seem organic and genuine, both those that are friendly and those that are less so. The world building is spot-on. Rather than populating the world with a thousand of planets full of humans and aliens, the Axiom series starts with a focus mostly on our solar system with politics dominated by Earth, the Jovian system and outer system (Uranus and vicinity) and one set of aliens with whom we have come into contact. While The Dreaming Stars expands that focus, it still is a relatively narrow one of a planet near a bridge (think artificial worm hole). This, too, seems like a natural organic progression to the stars. Tim Pratt’s dialog is crisp, sometimes snarky and evokes the perfect tone for the crew. One note: be prepared for a future where sexuality is quite fluid.
Mr. Pratt is adept at building out his characters, relationships and world through the storyline; he rarely falls back on mere exposition but drives the elements through the narrative nearly always showing us rather than telling us. He combines these intriguing characters and his intriguing world with a constantly moving and a clever storyline full of battles of wits, puzzles, subterfuge and an old fashioned mass uprising. I highly recommend Mr. Pratt’s The Dreaming Stars.
World: 4.5
Story: 4.5
Characters: 4
Relationships: 4

I though I had read the first book in this series but turns out I had not. As a result this was not a book I enjoyed the much. Good writing and interesting characters but too much backstory and world building was missing.

This is the second book in the series. The first introduced the reader to Elena and her crew who were in suspended animation for about five hundred years before encountering Axiom technology. This did not go well resulting in Elena being put back into cryosleep to save her and one of her crewmates, Sebastien, changing to an agent of the Axiom through implanted technology. After being discovered by hardnose salvage crew captain Kalea Machedo (Callie), Elena went with her to discover what had happened to her crew and rescue them.

In the process of The Wrong Stars we learned about a group of aliens called the Liars from whom humans gained a great deal of technology, but at the same time could never be sure of where they were coming from in terms of what might be the truth. A quote from The Dreaming Stars describes a key Liar Callie and her crew met in The Wrong Stars who became an ally and indicates the complexity of Liars culture:

“Lantern had been raised in the cult of truth tellers – Liars who didn’t lie – but the cult itself secretly served the interests of the sleeping Axiom, hiding the existence of their ongoing universe – altering projects from outsiders.”

In this sequel Callie, now Elena’s love interest, has to once again pick her way through both the politics of her slice of space and the now possible threat of the Axiom who could be awakening. Closer to home the implanted Sebastien appears to be hell bent on taking over the universe under the guidance of his Axiom technology.

The Wrong Stars is a good mix of humour and deadly serious, death-inducing situations. What makes it work well are the relationships between the different characters. Although Callie, Elena and Sebastien could be said to be the main protagonists, there is a great supporting cast who all have something to contribute. Lantern is my particular favourite and I would love to know more about Lantern’s life and society from the Liar’s viewpoint.

Callie is a well-imagined female character and Elena’s observation of her really gets to the core of her personality:

“Callie didn’t believe in accepting what she couldn’t change. She’d just change the circumstances until she could change whatever needed changing.”

This also demonstrates Elena is a useful mirror on Callie’s world and an interesting link between past and present.

What ensues is a tense action-packed thriller where everyone, particularly the dynamic and thinking-out-of-the-box Callie, has to somehow stay one step ahead of the technologically advanced Axiom and the type of games they play to conquer every lifeform they meet. The ending is indeed an interesting one.

[Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t read the first book in the series - The Wrong Stars - I give away some key plot points here]
Tim Pratt’s The Wrong Stars was something of a masterclass in how an author should stitch their worldbuilding into a novel’s plot and character growth. Having a character – in this case 500-year-old cryo-sleeper Elena Oh – who needs everything explained to them is not a new trick; the fun of the rest of the novel revolves around the explainers learning that everything they thought they knew about their world was actually wrong.
At the beginning of The Wrong Stars, Elena is rescued from her derelict ship by the crew of the salvage ship White Raven and its captain Callie Machedo. Elena spins a tale of barely escaping an encounter with terrifying alien beings who abducted her crew and altered her ship, a seed vessel sent out five centuries ago to find habitable worlds before faster than light travel was discovered. Callie informs her that humans have made contact with alien beings (who they call the Liars, because they literally lie about everything) who are anything but terrifying, and as far as they know, humans and Liars are the only intelligent species in the universe.
A whole lot happens between that and the end of the novel (and if you haven’t read it yet, do so, then come back here), so if we skip to the new status quo established at the end of The Wrong Stars, the crew of the White Raven learns that there is a race of megalomaniacal superbeings called the Axiom who are sleeping while some unknown grand scheme is coming to fruition, and the Liars (most of them unknowingly) serve the Axiom by keeping humans away from the Axiom’s areas of space. The White Raven acquires some very advanced Axiom tech and hijacks a pirate base on an asteroid (the pirates totally had it coming) and use it as a base of operations to learn about and thwart the Axiom’s plans.
There was no reason to expect The Dreaming Stars to duplicate the fiendish pace and table-turning plotting of its predecessor; narrative high-jumping can get tiresome as a baseline, and there are only so many times you can alter your readers’ understanding of the world you’re constructing without giving them plot-twist fatigue. The Wrong Stars ended right where it needed to, with our heroes and their companions reaching a firm understanding of the new rules of the game and their role in playing it. Not that there aren’t a few fun twists and surprises abound in The Dreaming Stars – they’re just more the plot-shaking rather than reality-shaking variety.
The Dreaming Stars picks up soon after the end of the first book, with the crew settling into their new home, dealing with the fallout from running afoul of the powerful Liar shadow government that serves the Axiom. Elena and Callie are firmly a couple now and are feeling out the terms of their relationship. Their Liar ally, Lantern, confirms that their involvement in the incident that put them at odds with the Elders, the Liars’ Axiom-serving secret sect, has been purged from all records and the individual Liars who know of their participation are all dead. Free to emerge from the shadows, Callie crashes her own funeral, and learns from her corporate honcho ex-husband that some of their ships operating near a new deep space colony have gone missing in a region of space Lantern flagged for possible Axiom activity. The prospect of getting paid to investigate the disappearances, while secretly looking into the Axiom, proves too enticing to pass up, so to the Taliesen system the White Raven goes. What they find there is definitely Axiom, and an immediate threat to the nearby planetary system.
If The Wrong Stars served as the equivalent of a “pilot episode”, The Dreaming Stars is the episode that primes the reader’s expectations for how the series will develop from book to book, and in that sense Pratt develops a comfortable pace and tone for the reader. It takes a little longer than expected for the plot’s inciting incident to establish a clear goal for our heroes, a forgivable offense one can chalk up to the new story formulations falling into place. Besides, we already like these characters and the world they inhabit; spending a little extra time with them living their lives is a welcome detour before the action and intensity takes over. The second half of the novel employs one of my favorite narrative devices: the “countdown clock”, in which the heroes face a time crunch on their way to annihilation, and limited resources to deploy. I don’t think the author quite exploits all the potential the countdown structure has to offer, but it does (self-consciously) serve up an enjoyable riff on Iain Banks’ classic The Player of Games.
There are plenty of other bonuses to be had in this first sequel. Pratt delves into some of the cultural angles that were only hinted at – a jaunt to jupiter’s moons shows us how human’s live when they’re not zipping around the galaxy in spaceships, and ship doctor Stephen’s hallucinogenic drug-centered religion The Church of the Ecstatic Divine is explored in greater detail. So too do the Axiom’s designs begin to unpeel, but not so much that we aren’t thirsting for the next installment. The Dreaming Stars may lack the manic buzz that defined its predecessor, but its steadiness inspires confidence that this series is built to last.

A less intense book than its predecessor, but one that leaves me very excited for where the series is going.

Fair warning, dear readers: this is the second book in the Axiom series, and as with all second book reviews, there may be small spoilers for the first book ahead! If a character-driven, banter-rich space opera with a great take on alien civilisations and "Big Dumb Objects" sounds like something you want to enjoy unspoiled, I suggest you stop reading now and just take my recommendation to go check out The Wrong Stars. If you like, you can come back when you're finished and I'll help you decide whether to read on.

The Wrong Stars was an unexpected hit with me, taking a ton of entertaining space opera ingredients reminiscent of everything from The Expanse to Douglas Adams and blending them into something unique and entertaining. The humans of Pratt's world had found their way into the solar system when a jellyfish-like race called the Liars made contact, telling grand stories of the wider galaxy and promising extraordinary technology in return for a base on Venus. The technology (and the base on Venus) materialised; the grand stories did not, and after several encounters with different delegations, humanity branded its new sentient friends the Liars and started a good-natured but sceptical relationship with its members. Now plugged in to a network of gates giving them access to nearly thirty different star systems, humanity happily develops in its new, larger sandbox. However, events involving Callie Machado and the crew of the White Raven, alongside five-hundred-year-old Elena Oh, sole surviving member of an ancient sub-light terraforming mission, and a surprisingly honest Liar named Lantern, have exposed this freedom for the lie it is. Now the crew of the White Raven are party to an ancient secret involving a dormant, all-powerful race of sadists who could wipe out humanity in a moment once we come to their notice - and, humanity being the curious-to-a-fault won't-take-no-for-an-answer race of stroppy teenagers we are, that's not a case of if but when.

There's probably enough background in The Dreaming Stars to make it accessible to anyone who hasn't already read the first book. We are re-introduced to the Liars and the now-expanded White Raven gang, who have spent the months since the end of the Wrong Stars getting progressively more bored in close confinement with each other. The book fills us in very effectively on the rest of the backstory too - the now not-so-mysterious (but still quite mysterious) Axiom, the fate of Meditreme Station, the relationships among the main characters and their respective histories with sociopathy-inducing brain spiders, and the other events that have led to our multi-temporal heroes hanging out on their cool but limited zero-g asteroid base.

Despite its generously informative start, I hesitate to recommend jumping in here even if you're normally content to start mid-series, because what follows is an enormous amount of processing and follow-up to previous events. There's relationship conversations! And time refugee conversations! And post-traumatic event grief conversations! And some more relationship conversations! And some Fun with Simulators and Gravity! And then some more relationship conversations, and suddenly I'm wondering how we are so far through the book without any clear plan beyond "let's go see Callie's serially unfaithful ex husband". There's a method to all of this, and I'm not saying there aren't some charming moments: Callie and Elena's relationship is gorgeously well-negotiated and straightforward, and any scene with Ashok, the chief engineer, is an instant favourite. However, having characters be generally quite nice and respectful to each other despite their differences (and this stretches to scenes with the unfaithful ex!) is simultaneously highly refreshing while also limiting the hooks that conflict and tension can be built on, and with a notable exception near the start, everything in the first third of The Dreaming Stars has pretty low stakes.

Once the plot does get into gear, it's well worth the effort, although we're pushing halfway by the time we arrive on The Planet Where Stuff Happens, making the action portion of The Dreaming Stars rather compressed. Despite this, it all works out terribly cleverly, especially the solution to the finale's conundrum, which simultaneously does justice to the overpowering strength of the Axiom while also giving the humans a very believable and satisfying path to resolution. The Axiom themselves are a fantastic antagonist race, combining the unknowable menace of the Trisolarans with a terrifying aura of ominpresence that isn't diminished by the way things play out here. As soon as Axiom technology reasserts its presence in The Dreaming Stars, the tone of the story completely shifts, and Pratt manages to walk a very clever line between allowing his characters plot armour and letting us relax into their development knowing it's all basically going to be OK, while keeping the tension going because it's nearly impossible to tell, until the very last minute, exactly how this could possibly turn out fine for everyone once the Axiom are involved.

The crew of the White Raven also demonstrate how effortless and natural writing diversity into one's far-future space opera can be. Queerness is the norm, and people are open and communicative about their boundaries and methods of demonstrating affection. Notably, Callie is written as demisexual, which I don't think I've seen explicitly recognised in a book like this before, and there's also textual references to aromanticism (and, in the Wrong Stars, asexuality, though I don't think it comes up again here). Attention is also paid to neurodiversity and disability, although I believe the disabled characters are all disabled through accidents rather than by birth. This isn't something I'd have picked up on a couple of weeks ago, but it's been brought to my attention by Elsa Sjunneson Henry's excellent post-Worldcon thread on how eugenicist thinking often creeps into science fiction worldbuilding by failing to acknowledge that disabled people now don't want to be cured or erased from the future by technology or whatever else. Just as neurodiverse characters like Uzoma and Sebastien have a place in the future, it would be nice to see that extended to disabled characters who just are, rather than the narrative emphasising extenuating circumstances as if disability somehow needs those to be allowed to exist.

If The Wrong Stars was the must-watch, high octane double-length pilot of your new favourite TV show, The Dreaming Stars is like taking a sample of the series middle, encompassing "the character driven talky episode" and "the really clever high-stakes detour". On its own, it's decent but not spectacular, but as part of a developing whole it represents a series that's shaping up as far more than the sum of its parts, and there's so much more to be developed: I want more Liars, more Drake and Janice, more glimpses at solar system and/or galactic politics and, please oh please, a lot more Ashok. If the author or publisher are reading this, I'd like to make clear that I would read the hell out of a 12-books-with-no-end-in-sight October Daye style Axiom series where Callie, Elena and the gang go on monster-of-the-week adventures disabling Axiom technology and saving the humans while getting slow-burning character development and the occasional game-changing plot twist in the background.

The Math
Baseline Score: 6/10
Pros: +1 Encourages readers to take space jellyfish seriously, unlike certain franchises *cough Mass Effect cough* +1 Contributing to a series that's already more than the sum of its parts
Cons: -1 Could have kicked off the cool alien stuff a bit sooner.
Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Note: I received an Advance Reading Copy of this book through NetGalley for an honest review.

I bought the first part of the Axiom series, The Wrong Stars, on a whim in a sale. When I saw the second part, The Dreaming Stars, up for review on NetGalley I couldn’t help myself, and requested it. Luckily I got it, because I really like this series, and can’t wait for part three (tentatively titled The Forbidden Stars).

After the adventures of Callie and her crew in The Wrong Stars, they are on the hunt for any Axiom projects, artefact or locations. When news reaches them of crews going missing, and a whole Liar/Free station has gone silent, they must decide if they will go on and investigate. This is of course never a real question, so they all go on to the Taliesen system to check out what is going on. Quickly they stumble upon artefacts that might be Liar, but probably are Axiom. The Axiom artefact they find this time is a lot harder to beat.

This second book in the Axiom series continues the great characterization and diversity started in the first book. We learn more about the characters from the Anjou, we meet new characters and learn more about the cultures, planets, galaxies and developments in the universe that Pratt has imagined for us. The adventure in the Taliesen galaxy with the Axiom is even bigger than what happened when the White Raven crew first discovered the Axiom, and to my joy we learn a lot more about this strange and dangerous alien race. We also learn more about the Liars, and indeed about the human developments of the last 500 years. Elena is a wonderful guide for us and I love that Pratt uses this mechanism to introduce all kinds of concepts to us. What can I say, if you liked The Wrong Stars, you’ll like The Dreaming Stars, I know I did. Four out of five stars.

This book was not to my taste. I found it rather generic and bland. I did not finish and will not be reading more of this series. I will not be doing a full review on my blog.