The Wrong Stars

The Wrong Stars is a fast-paced space opera structured around the dangerous allure of mysteries. The main characters are perfectly aware that some things are better left alone, untouched, but they can’t help it. Human beings are drawn to the unknown like moths to light: the characters must uncover the many secrets the universe holds even if that means facing massive golden spiders.

The story follows the crew of the White Raven, a small ship captained by Callie Machedo, which is employed by a big space corporation to hunt down pirates and scavengers. One fateful day, they come across an ancient exploration vessel, sent 500 years ago to discover habitable planets, floating in space with “a bizarre eruption of flanges, fins, and spikes at one end that looked like the embellishments of a mad welder.” Inside, in cryosleep, there’s a survivor, doctor Elena Oh, who tells them – after being woken up – she has made first contact.

Humanity, however, has known aliens for some time. A single race of squids of various sizes known simply as Liars because they tend to lie a lot. The squids lie about who they are, where they come from, where they’re going, how their technology works, and even about what they ate for breakfast. They will claim that the ending of Game of Thrones was revered worldwide and that Rise of Skywalker is everyone’s favorite Star Wars movie. Even though the prospect of a deeply untrustworthy alien species of squids with vastly superior technology may seem terrifying, the Liars are initially framed in a humorous way.

There’s a scene in which Callie explains the Liars to Elena, since the doctor has been frozen for five centuries and doesn’t know what’s going on – she’s that type of character whose ignorance contextualizes exposition. Callie’s tone when she’s talking about the lying squids is not serious at all: she seems more annoyed by them than anything. Elena, in turn, is fascinated by the aliens and questions the captain about what they do when caught in a lie. Callie answers:

“They say the lies are translation errors, or that we talked to heretics from a Doomsday religion, or that our ambassadors are mentally ill pathological liars, or that our feeble human minds can’t comprehend their truths, or that we must have followed their directions incorrectly, or that reality is a glitched simulation. A Liar will tell you the sky on Earth is green, and when you object, he’ll explain that humans just have inferior color receptors.”

As the Liars are friendly creatures that often refuse to resort to violence, they are at first a frequent source of whimsy to the narrative. They’re the reason The Wrong Stars works so well. They are strange and amusing and, by their very nature, mysterious.

“I hate mysteries,” Callie says to her engineer, Ashok, in the first pages of the novel, “you always think it’s going to be a box full of gold, but usually it’s a box full of spiders.” They are about to search the strange spaceship in front of them, so she tackles the contradiction at the heart of the matter: “What can I say?” Callie explains, “I like gold more than I hate spiders.”

This sentence is the driving force of the narrative. The characters are constantly putting themselves in danger because they must find out what is in the box, even though – as detective Mills knows – the answer is not always very comforting. The allure is stronger than the fear.

Mysteries are part of the structure of the book, which is frequently raising questions to keep the reader engaged.  It begins with The White Raven coming across a floating ship and the characters immediately starting to ask questions about the problem. What awaits them in the ship? What’s the point of the strange spikes at one end? Why is it just floating around, unguarded? They meet Elena, who tells them what she remembers. Now, more questions are raised: who are the aliens she met, as they don’t seem like Liars? What happened to her crew? And so on. Each major event in The Wrong Stars has a bunch of mysteries attached to it, making the characters constantly fight for information and get in increasingly dangerous situations: the search for the truth is never an easy one.

The novel starts with the foot on the gas and never slows down. The inciting incident – Callie finding Elena’s ship – is told in the very first pages of the novel, for instance, and there are constant twists and turns moving the story forward, leaving no time to breathe. Even the characters act in this rhythm. There’s a moment when Elena starts to question if she’s to blame for the tragedies that are happening around them, and Callie snaps at her, “We need to put aside that guilt and blame and shit for now.” The crew of the White Raven is mostly pragmatic and they are in a constant “problem-solving mindset”, especially after things get messy.

But this also means that there’s no time for actual character development, especially when it comes to the secondary ones. The crew of the White Raven is composed of just a few members, but some of them – like Drake and Janice – never rise beyond their bizarre traits. Take the engineer Ashok, for example. His thing is that he has a fetishistic relationship with technology: when he sees some new piece of equipment that he finds fascinating he immediately wants to attach it to his body – which basically turns him into a kind of cyborg. This is quirky and interesting, but it’s never developed, remaining a weird gag throughout the novel.

The two main characters, Callie and Elena, are developed in a similar manner. They have a crush on one another. The former is imposing, dominating, and pragmatic, while the doctor is altruistic and heroic: they are each the other’s type. The narrative never pushes them to test these qualities, content on making these traits the totality of who the characters are.

One of the causes of this problem is how the overall light-hearted tone of the narrative is built. Everyone here makes jokes about the danger they’re in and have witty banter. It’s funny, but it also robs them of individuality, since every single one of them talks and acts like that.

The character that stands out the most is the AI, Shall, and mostly because he’s the only one complaining about his situation and the way he’s treated by the crew. His jokes seem forced as if he’s trying to emulate his companions without sharing the same wit, while his passive-aggressive personality makes his dissatisfaction even more pronounced.

Another problem of the novel is its refusal to let the main characters lose. No matter how grave the situation is, they always come out on top. Since we never believe they are in real danger, some scenes that depend on that tension fall flat – especially the convoluted “suicide mission” at the end.

The Wrong Stars follows a specific formula but does so mostly well. Reading The Wrong Stars is like watching a good Marvel movie: it’s fast-paced, funny, and engaging. It provides a good time.

March 18, 2021.