Customer Reviews

Steal Across the Sky

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I am really no good at writing book reviews, so I will just tell you my opinion. I almost didn't pick this book. I was at the library and out of time. As I was checking out this book caught my eye in the "new books" section and I decided to just grab it and I am really glad that I did.

I love the advertising on the internet thing and I love that this is a sci fi book based in the very near future. I think the discoveries made by the Witnesses in this book were unexpected and I have never read anything like it.

I do wish the book had taken the time to explore some of the other planets more. It seemed odd to me that of the two planets explored (in the book) both were very primitive by our standards yet both had been given just as much time to evolve as we on Earth had been given.

All in all I found this a good read, light enough for a busy mom of three to be able to pay attention to, but deep enough for a busy mom of three to be able to escape in a book. I know as far as book reviews go mind kinda sucks, sorry about that. But overall I found this to be interesting and different, something I really enjoyed.

If you enjoy Sci-fi I think its worth checking this book out :)

I like Kress and own many of her books. This one held high hopes but ultimately failed due to a shift in focus, insertion of unnecessary comments and an absurd ending. As many have stated, the first half of the book captured the attention of the reader. Sci-fi at its best: the slow buildup, the alien planets, the growing realization of what the Atoners were atoning for...fine.

Then we shift to Earth where we are absorbed with the daily lives of the "witnesses", those selected to venture into space aboard alien craft and observe what the alien race had done to us 10,0000 years ago. We encounter our first logical flaw. Although the vast majority hear the news and go on with their lives, some are so upset that they diligently seek to destroy the messenger. One is reminded of those shows where it is alleged that companies routinely assassinate employees who find problems or emergency rooms in which doctors are engaged in a round of rotating romances with each other. Then there are the unnecessary trivial comments - global warming, health care, "Georgia" voters, religion. Because they were not handled adroitly, they only cheapen the novel, even trivialize it. I call it arrested development; despite inventions, new discoveries, incredible science and the passage of time, folks have the same concerns 20 years from now. We don't even talk about the same things we did 10 years ago!

The ultimate folly, however, is notion that a gene allows us to (**** warning! plot reveal ****) "see the dead". It reminded me of HEROES in which evolutionary changes morphed into such things as invisibility, flying or time traveling. What does viewing dead folks have to do with DNA? As usual, excellent characterization and as usual, the females shine. Soledad and Cam literally carried the book forward. Most of the males were shallow caricatures - Frank, the embittered Catholic, Lucca, the jaded widowere, Fengmo, the every man's gay man.

The ending is two-fold, one good (even great) and one other trite. The appearance of the "aliens" was so hokey one wonders if it was an intentional inside joke. My grade - C+

I like Nancy Kress, but Steal Across The Sky didn't really hit the mark for me. The story I wanted to be told failed to arrive. Without spoiling it, the basic set up is that the humans are chosen to witness something the aliens need to atone for and that thing will not be revealed to them but discovered. We follow only a small number of the witnesses (less than half) and when we find out what the crime was, yes, it is huge with huge ramifications but those aren't explored.

The book is about the process of making the discovery and to some extent the result of that on the small number of the team we meet. I wanted, while reading the book, to know why the aliens committed the crime - how the crime impacted the various persons it was perpetuated upon, what the discovery process was for the other witnesses - maybe even the commonality or lack of in the victims of the crime. I give the book four stars for making me want to know these things, but three stars for the read it actually was. I found myself scanning the last third to see if it was going anywhere else and I was disappointed it wasn't. I really didn't care at all about the resolution of the characters I started out with.

While on vacation, I bought this book as a remainder after seeing (via Amazon mobile app) that it had good reviews. It's a good story, though not one that kept me glued to the book until I'd finished. The science was interesting. The characters real. Overall, the book is good enough for a vacation-read, but not good enough to keep on my shelves with my other Nancy Kress books.

It could have been better or even worse.

Better would have been easier. How? Cut out all the unnecessary bits, the song lyrics, the crossword puzzle and the other nonsense that was inserted though out the book. Except for the section listing the names and short bios for each of the witnesses. That should have been moved to the front of the book for easy reference.

When I started reading the book, I was under the assumption that I was reading a science fiction book since it was advertised and sold as science fiction. In my opinion, it fails miserable as a science fiction book but when I started to look at it as a mystery with science fiction elements it made more sense.

Dialogue wasn't bad, neither were the descriptions, no funny lines for the sake of being funny but on the other hand, nothing memorable.

Chemistry between characters was lukewarm at best. The action scenes lacked spark (something was missing) and whenever the book did start moving, the author threw in another page of nonsense, which broke the flow over and over again.

Will I ever read another book by the author? Honestly? Probably not.

Good science fiction is more about the characters than the science. And this is good science fiction. Unfortunately, Kress goes a little overboard in weighting the book toward the characters (sometimes less human drama is more), but this is still a very interesting story. Kress presents a familiar question (what comes after death) and answers it in a unique way, without taking any of the various moralistic routes a less skilled author might have.

This book starts out like a dynamo and then fizzles about halfway through. A group of individuals are selected by aliens called "the Atoners" to travel to other planets in the Universe to act as witnesses for the Earth. Apparently, the Atoners had visited Earth several thousand years ago and had done something to humanity. The witnesses will be able to determine exactly what happened by visiting these remote planets.

The first half of the book focuses on three individuals; Cam, Lucca and Soledad. Cam and Lucca visited two sister planets while Soledad guides them from space. Lucca's planet seems to be inhabited by a bunch of wandering nomads, while Cam happens on a warlike planet. Lucca is injured in his landing and the nomads take him with them as part of their group. Meanwhile an evil king wants Cam dead and sends his emissary, Aveo to capture her. Cam and Lucca's tales are highly intriguing and I could have given the book five stars. However, once they learn what the Atoners had done, the second half of the book focuses on the three on Earth after they have returned months later. The author then introduces another of the witnesses, Frank, who is on a religious mission to make the Atoners give back to mankind what they had stolen.

The second half of the book drags and has none of the real intrigue of the first half. Even with the author interspersed cute advertisements from the future and other little tidbits like memos from the President, the book is not saved from being painfully difficult to finish. By the time the ultimate resolution with the Atoners is reached the reader doesn't care anymore.

A better book would have been to expand the tale of Cam and Lucca on their respective planets and possibly rewrite the second half of the book as a sequel.

Nancy Kress has once again written a piece of fascinating science fiction. "What if?" is one of my favorite questions, and it's the question this book asks. It's a questions she's asked before, and once again she's drawn us in as she considers it. I won't disclose the second half of the "What if....." question, since I hate spoilers, but it's a good one and could use further exploration.

Now my quibble. The book falls into two halves. One deals with humans dropped into alien cultures. The second deals with aftermath back on Earth. I loved the first half. Kress has a gift for alien culture building and the ethical issues visited upon terran observers. I totally love the naive Earthlings trying to figure out what's going on. It tickles my brain in the right way and both entertains and provides a puzzle. Good stuff.

Back on earth, though, it all fell flat. Not totally, abysmally, unreadably flat, but flat compared with how engaged I was in the first half. I dunno. Maybe she just doesn't like Earth as much as Elsewhere. I don't blame her. And I didn't put the book down; I wanted to find out how the little twisty bit left over from the first half would play out. It played out satisfactorally for now and in such a way that I suspect we may in future be reading more of the story. If this turns into a series like the Sleepless books, you'd hear no objection from me. It reminds me of them in some ways which would be obvious to all but those who haven't read it yet.

I'm going to keep reading Kress. OK, this one's a bit uneven, but she's still good. Very good. Enjoy!

The alien Atoners race came from deep space to establish a base on the earth's moon. They use the Internet to inform humanity that they committed a heinous crime against mankind ten millennium ago that they cannot rectify. Instead they ask for twenty-one English speaking volunteers to serve as witnesses to see the results of the crime they committed by witnessing and testifying first hand what has occurred on seven planets in which they seeded abducted earthlings. Safety is guaranteed to and from the planets visited.

Cam, Lucca and Soledad respond to the Internet advertisement and are selected by the Atoners as human surrogates. They are escorted to the moonless twin planets of Kular A and Kular B. The humans living on these orbs treat life as expendable as they believe that life does not end with death. What the three human visitors learn they bring back to an earth already reeling from the alien visitation.

STEAL ACROSS THE SKY is an exhilarating cerebral science fiction thriller that asks profound questions about humanity's development, religion, and social interaction through the Atoner (apropos descriptor for this group) intervention. The three earthlings represent mankind visiting two planets in which each orb can be seen in the sky of the other; while the Atoners remain mysterious almost Godly due to their superior technology, knowledge, and humble need to atone for their mistake. The residents of the two deep space orbs also seem real even as their culture (their existence actually) on the Kular twins is owed to the Atoners, which makes for a fascinating religious relationship between the settled and those who performed the deliverance. Nancy Kress provides plenty of action, but it is the thought provoking questions to include defining what a crime is that make this a great tale.

Harriet Klausner

Nancy Kress is a master at starting a story one place and ending it another. In Stealing Across the Sky I thought I knew where the story was going but had it all wrong. In the near future Earth has been visited by the Atoners, aliens who removed humans from Earth 10,000 years ago, placed them on different planets and used them in an experiment they now feel was wrong. The Atoners have chosen 21 Witnesses to visit the planets where the humans were sent to witness what was done. It looks like following the Witnesses on those planets is the story, but after the first third of the book the story moves to what happens when the Witnesses come back to Earth. The premise is good, the mystery well presented and the cast of characters keeps everything moving forward. This is an interesting what if story about humans and what we might be missing.