I need to start off this review with a rather bold claim: If the Stars Are Lit has one of the best blurbs I’ve ever read:

When the starship ferrying her to Earth is gutted by an explosion, Joss Carsten is left alone and adrift, struggling to reestablish communication with humanity. But her health is fading fast, and her isolation is triggering painful hallucinations of Alice, her long-estranged wife.

From that description, the novel sounds almost like a queer Solaris (1961), and I was genuinely giddy to begin reading. After all, the premise sounds extremely fucked up, and I do love fucked up writing.

The story opens shortly before the calamity, with the grizzled Joss providing a distinctive voice for us to follow. Drinking in the ship’s bar, Joss would be a fairly standard detective archetype were she a heterosexual man, but her being a queer woman gives her an edge that I really enjoy. Her character is cohesive and … well, if not likeable then she’s at least a curious person to follow. Of course, it isn’t long before all hell breaks loose, and Joss’s drinking time is interrupted by a calamity that kills every other passenger, as well as her squad. By the end of the chapter, Joss is left all alone and looking out over where most of the ship used to be. It’s a wonderfully haunting description: “A view of the black, spattered by cold white stars. The curve of Petal 4’s loading dock protrudes like a diving board into oblivion.”

The description above makes this sound like a solid opening, but I actually think a tighter, tenser start would have worked far better—or at least clearer. For example, if the first page began with Joss waking up post-calamity, the sole survivor of the mystery accident, then we as readers would be discovering the disaster right alongside her. The attachment between audience and protagonist would be stronger, and concepts could be slowly revealed as Joss explores her surroundings, allowing the novel’s many—many—different elements to slowly sink in. We already spend a lot of this novel in Joss’s past; this change would not have affected this structure.

As it stands, the first chapter features far too many people and ideas, all of which are launched toward the reader at high velocity. This results in a besiegement of technical terms and locations, alongside the names of work colleagues and influential people aboard the ship. Not to mention the gemels—a form of sentient hologram created from an individual’s psyche. I found myself rereading whole paragraphs just to keep up with the novel’s concepts, when I’d have preferred a smooth, mysterious start that gradually fills us in on the world. Of course, how this feels will depend upon the reader, but I prefer to take novels at a slower pace which allows emotions and notions to sink in, and am entirely left behind by a bombardment of breakneck revelations.

Still, this improves from chapter two, where we’re finally given chance to take stock of Joss, her injuries, and her dire situation. This is where the novel truly begins:

Joss Carsten has always had problems. Now she has three.

She’s alone on a ship in deep space.

The comms are down.

Everybody’s dead.

Almost.

From here, the novel carefully balances existential horror with a crisp sense of humour, as a short-tempered, injured Joss interacts with the ship’s voice systems. We’re also fed some delicious speculative social commentary, as the narration details the class divides of communication: The wealthy can reach one another far more effectively, while the poorer are separated by excessively shoddy and slow messaging services. Ellis has clearly put a significant amount of consideration into her worldbuilding, and if you’ve read my reviews before, then you’ll know that’s something I always appreciate. The haunting sense of loss is furthered by Joss’s only form of company: the delayed messages to now-dead passengers.

Over and over, we’re presented with sad and sinister revelations, and it truly drew me into Joss’s predicament. This culminates in the ship’s decision to create her very own gemel—and Joss’s subconscious selects the image of her ex-wife, Alice. We’re also provided with an explanation on the technology’s background, which is reminiscent of Black Mirror’s notorious “White Christmas” episode:

Their genesis came from Gestalt therapy, and their first prototypes proved to be remarkably successful in a version of the Empty Chair technique. But like all such inventions, their purpose was warped by narcissists with fat wallets and the desire for more intimate personal assistants.

Yet this confused me for the rest of the story. The gemel is formed from Joss’s subconscious and looks like her ex-wife, yet the gemel doesn’t seem to have a personality that really matches either. Unfortunately, gemel-Alice doesn’t appear to have much personality at all. Her role in the novel is mostly limited to revelations and mild flirtation with Joss, a mirror for her hopes and romantic desires. This would paint Joss as one of those “narcissists” just mentioned, which would be an interesting direction for the novel to take … yet the narrative never teases this idea. The bond between Joss and gemel-Alice is presented as wholesome, though I’m not sure who, exactly, Joss was connecting with here. Herself? Her ex’s memory? The incredibly bland gemel?

Worse, the novel’s entire premise—its promise—is abandoned halfway through. Joss is indeed rescued from the ship, and I kept wondering if this was some sort of dream or hallucination of Joss’s, because surely, surely, the protagonist’s survival wasn’t already assured? But alas, Joss isn’t just rescued, she’s rescued by her actual ex-wife.

All right, so the direction has changed. This new scenario at least sets up some fascinating interpersonal conflict, as real-Alice is confronted by not just her ex but her ex’s crush on a gemel that looks and sounds exactly like her. That’s something I’ve not seen in fiction before, but unfortunately this situation just doesn’t pay off. Real-Alice is mildly disturbed, sure, but, in my opinion, not enough. It’s an opportunity for a complex emotional reaction that’s lost, as Real-Alice very quickly moves her focus to the plot’s central crisis instead.

This brings us to the novel’s real issue. Halfway through the book, I wrote this in my notes: THIS NOVEL HAS WAY TOO MANY ELEMENTS AND DESPERATELY NEEDS PARING DOWN. The all-caps was a futile way of venting my frustration, because too little is explored in depth. Inventive and twisted scenarios are introduced, but none are ever developed quite enough to be satisfying. For each setup there’s a hurried resolution before we’re moved on again. If the relationship between Joss and the gemel is really so central to the plot, then it deserves an appropriate number of pages devoted to it, allowing us to see their bond slowly unfurl in spite of all the complexities they face. Yet the novel’s hyperactive approach to storytelling leads to us being told about developments rather than shown them. We’re emphatically informed of the connection they’ve developed together, but I don’t feel as though I actually got to see it. Hell, I have a closer relationship with Siri.

I’m not looking to spoil the final third of the novel, but sadly what becomes of gemel-Alice is predictable, while also undercutting much of the novel’s messaging on sentience. Though we’re told over and over that she’s an individual with dignity and her own free will, gemel-Alice is, in fact, entirely expendable. She barely even features for this last part of the novel, popping up only to not matter. Because the truth is she never mattered. If you don’t see her eventual fate coming from a thousand light-years away, then you’ve never read a science fiction story before.

All right, I’m sounding negative. I know. But it’s only because there are real flashes of brilliance in this novel. After the ship is destroyed, Joss and gemel-Alice scan the broadcasts from the nearby planet—only to discover that every single one of them is fake. It’s an absolutely chilling moment, one that implies that everyone on the ground is dead and that some mysterious entity is using their voices and visages to hide the fact. At another point, gemel-Alice uses Joss’s own memories (to which she has encyclopedic access) in order to relay a clue about their current situation, a mystery which pulled me back into the book. Then, further on, we get a pilot’s last words as he’s dragged into a rift in our reality: “Commander! It’s so dark.”

Those four words chilled me. They hinted at what could have been, because the novel lacks that sense of deep-space isolation, the helplessness of being the sole survivor of a spaceship disaster, the psychological tension of being all alone with a sentient doppelgänger of your ex-spouse. With a little streamlining and conceptual editing, If the Stars Are Lit could have been a truly exceptional story. As it stands, it’s something I’d recommend solely to fans of titanium-hard sci-fi starring queer characters, a lack of focus, and a loose, ever-moving plot.

I really, really don’t enjoy tearing down queer indie SF stories, especially as I want more of them to exist. But it’s precisely because I want such tales to flourish that I have to be honest here. It’s true that If the Stars Are Lit has a whole bunch of fantastic ideas and some very solid worldbuilding. What it doesn’t have is effective editing. The novel’s strong hook is continually diverted, with the story meandering into subplots when that space would be better suited to the main narrative. The moments that focus on the isolated claustrophobia of the ship are the strongest, drawing the reader into a memorable experience that I wish had lasted. There’s something delightfully twisted and egotistical about falling for a gemel, considering it’s formed from your own subconscious.

Indeed, in reading this novel, “twisted” is the word that comes to mind again and again. I love twisted. I revel in twisted. And there are wonderfully warped elements here—I just wish the author’s ideas were only given more time to settle. In spite of my criticisms I do hope to see more from Sara K Ellis, if only because she can clearly take her dark, inventive creations much further than this. With fewer story elements, plot diversions, and lengthy flashbacks—alongside a stronger focus on darker elements—we could see some wonderful speculative horror emerge. And considering the mood that many of us are in lately, that’s something that would do extremely well.