Anne McCaffrey and Jody Lynn Nye - The Death of Sleep

When I was in second or third grade, I read my way through the early Pern books. I really enjoyed them, but when I returned to McCaffrey a few years later I found she bored me to tears. Even those same books I loved before did almost nothing for me. Consequently, I've mostly avoided her writing for the past fifteen or twenty years.

Lately I've become a big fan of Elizabeth Moon so when I stumbled on the Planet Pirates series I decided to give it a chance. A three book series written jointly by Moon, McCaffrey, and Jody Lynn Nye, the Planet Pirates series is space opera at its most traditional and, at times, most improbable. The Death of Sleep is either the first or the second book in the series, depending on which listing you consult. In the omnibus edition of the series it's presented first and that's how I read it.

Lunzie Mespil is a doctor specializing in deep space traumas. Her work takes her into space, forcing her to leave 14 year old daughter Fiona behind. Unfortunately there's an accident on her way to a new mining colony and she must enter cryostasis to wait out rescue in an escape pod. Her fellow shipmates are all rescued quickly, but Lunzie's pod remained undiscovered for 62 years. She's successfully recovered, but finds it difficult to adjust to a world where her teenager is a great-grandmother, coffee has gone the way of the dinosaurs, and her cultural references are all askew.

Her main goal is locating her daughter, a daughter she believed captured or killed in a distant pirate raid. She realizes that going off half-cocked won't help, so she settles in to brush up her skills as a doctor and soon settles into university life while trying to shake information out of uncooperative bureaucrats. Eventually she locates her daughter and journeys to meet her and the extensive members of the younger generations of her family. Another accident occurs and it's time for cryosleep yet again. Are you sensing a pattern yet?

The first half or so of the book, up until the second space accident, was a decent story. The characters were interesting and believable, the pacing a tad slow but not unbearably so, and the universe fairly competently structured. There wasn't anything original there, but it was nicely put together standard stuff. The problem comes at the second accident and beyond. The book fell into a rut, got very repetitious. The last two mini-adventures feel identical, and I kept expecting every other page to lead to something that places Lunzie into cryosleep yet again. There's only so much "shipboard duty followed by sudden incident followed by escape followed by cryosleep" a girl can take in one sitting.

The book ends fairly suddenly on something of a cliffhanger (I'll give you one guess what it is) and presumably the story will be taken up in the other books in the series. It felt like a sudden ending in that the particular circumstances were pretty much identical to events we'd encountered several times before in the book. It was somewhat shocking to the system to wind up in such a familiar spot since McCaffrey and Nye (the authors of this particular volume) had landed us there before and not deemed it a fitting climax to the story.

Realistically, the first half of the book would have made an excellent novella, but there wasn't enough meat to this particular story to support a full novel. I can only hope that the later novels offer something a bit different rather than more of the same. I am planning on giving them a try - I enjoyed the world and the characters enough to do so, plus I want to see what Moon contributes to this series - but if they're anything like The Death of Sleep I may abandon them. There's only so much repetitious melodrama one can take, and The Death of Sleep has already surpassed my quota. I can't really recommend this particular book, but I hold some hope that the series can be redeemed.