(courtesy Hachette Australia)
When a novel starts with four young friends accidentally steal a spaceship on a near-future earth stumbling towards environmental and societal collapse, you know you’re in for something rippling with verve and imagination.
But then, when said novel throws in a big, deep mystery – just where did the crew of the Providence 1 vanish to twenty years earlier when their mission to Proxima Centauri B was about to lift off? – and a race to save the galaxy which, anyway is having its physics and sense of self tossed royally on its head, you have a story that is just begging to be read.
And read The Stars Too Fondly by Emily Hamilton you must, a glorious mix between space opera with attitude, anxiety and snappily warm & funny dialogue, and a sapphic rom-com where the lead character Cleo, who’s long dreamed of becoming an astronaut but maybe not like this thank you very much, falls head over heals in love with the hologram resident in Providence 1, Billie, who is the spitting image of the now-disappeared head of the mission, Captain Wilhemina Lucas.
They might seem like two very divergent elements to mix into a sci-fi tale writ large, but Hamilton absolutely makes it work, serving up some big action set pieces and dramatic existential quandaries while letting things simmer close up and personal when that’s called for which for four close friends – Cleo, Abe, Kaleisha and Ros – who don’t expect to lose over a decade getting to and from a planet they never expected to visit, is quite a lot.
‘Now, McQueary [Cleo]. It’s urgent.
Cleo turned to the other three, ready for them to defend her. But Abe still looked worried, and Kaleisha was murmuring something sweet to him, and Ros was rolling over in bed, pulling the sheets up to their ears.
Cleo, feeling very ignored, threw her hands up and trudged after Billie.
An edge-of-the-seat story which does let the figurative pedal off the metal but once, though it does, as noted, have some lovely moments of self-reflection and raw emotional honesty, The Stars Too Fondly, which draws its title from the poem, “The Old Astronomer and His Pupil” (Sarah Williams, 1868), is one of those space opera that goes deep down into what makes us human.
Specifically how even people who are brilliant and clever as Cleo and her friends undoubtedly are can struggle to work out how to connect and how to belong and to live in a family, either the one you’re born into or the one you create.
In fact, while the story underpinning The Stars Too Fondly is enrapturingly complex and good and makes you want to keep flipping those pages like someone travelling at light speed, it’s really about how love can defy our ability to understand it and work it out and sometimes what we need to do is just lean into it and be.
Cleo, for all her astronomical brilliance, really struggles with that idea, and while it’s abundantly clear to everyone that she is in love with Billie, it takes our plucky, wisecracking, gutsy young hero quite some time to work that out for herself, and more importantly, to become comfortable with the idea that while love makes you vulnerable and raw, it also gifts you with all the best of things too.
(courtesy official author site)
And that really is the instructive lesson of The Stars Too Fondly.
While all the talk and adventuring about dark matter and space travel across trillion of kilometres and solar systems where humanity might get a second chance not to destroy itself is enthrallingly, immersively good, what drives the storyline is now all that big, epic narrative stuff only unfolds in the way it does because Cleo, Abe, Kaleisha and Ros, and yes, Billie, care so damn much for each other.
The galaxy needs to be saved yes, and massively intriguing mysteries solved too, but it all means nothing if these five people – strictly speaking four people and a hologram but who’s counting? Certainly not lovestruck Cleo – aren’t there for each other all the way every twist and turn.
It’s their togetherness, love and sense of family that drives The Stars Too Fondly which knows how to be both the sci-fi epic you need and crave and the rom-com that will delight your happy big queer (or non-queer; we’re not playing sexuality favourites here) to an elevating degree.
For a novel that’s often incredibly serious – hello, we are saving the galaxy and rescuing previously unknown worlds and species, thank you – The Stars Too Fondly is also vibrantly fun and silly and hilarious because everyone on board, traumatised though they may be by their unexpected trip to the stars, are close to each other and that’s what besties do, especially when their collective backs are against the starlit wall.
‘It’s just always stuck with me, you know? Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night. Even though everyone did get fearful, after that.’
If you love sci-fi that goes big and deep and wide in its storytelling, that grapples with big ideas but also big emotions and some cool thoughts on humanity and family and love, then The Stars Too Fondly is your new must-read.
It’s a novel that enthralls your mind yes, but which absolutely without a shadow of a doubt seizes your heart too, proof that while blockbuster-y stories with rich intelligence and emotion explosively told are well and truly worth the price of admission, they need us to feel everything to really carry the goods all the way home.
A love letter to Star Trek and our love affair with space and its myriad possibilities that bundles in some dystopian angst and steampunk bravado too, The Stars Too Fondly is the kind of clever, thoughtful sci-fi tale that knows that while stories of stolen spaceships and existence on the line are brilliantly necessary, that we need them to mean something, anything or it will be all epic nothingness banging on rather loudly.
Hamilton has given, us in The Stars Too Fondly a story that is rich and compelling and a ton of fun to boot; you will gasp at the revelations, thrill at the premise, adore the way the characters interact and have fun being space Miss Marple trying to solve the mystery of what happened and why but ultimately, you will love these people, what they mean to each other and why them getting home means the absolute world because family is everything and nothing means anything without it.