Star Splitter

by Matthew J. Kirby Narrated by Jennifer Jill Araya, Cory Myler

Overview

A 2024 Edgar Award Nominee!

Survival and self-determination collide in this haunting, pulse-pounding science fiction novel from Edgar Award-winning author Matthew J. Kirby that spans both space and time.

“An intense, read-in-one-sitting kind of ride.¿-Kirkus, starred review


2199. Deep-space exploration is a reality and teleportation is routine. But this time something has gone very, very wrong. Seventeen-year-old Jessica Mathers wakes up in a lander that's crashed onto the surface of Carver 1061c, a desolate, post-extinction planet fourteen light-years from Earth. The planet she was supposed to be viewing from a ship orbiting far above.

The corridors of the empty lander are covered in bloody hand prints; the machines are silent and dark. And outside, in the alien dirt, there are fresh graves carefully marked with names she doesn't recognize. Now Jessica must unravel the mystery of the destruction all around her-and the questionable intentions of a familiar stranger.

Editorial Reviews

APRIL 2023 - AudioFile

Listeners are teleported to the year 2198 as Jennifer Jill Araya portrays the crew aboard the DS THESEUS. Teenager Jessica Mathers is angry at her parents for having left her when she was 11 to do research in space and for making her join them now on a year-long mission to an extinct planet. The cloning and printing technology used for deep-space transportation is supposed to be safe, but corrupt data could mean danger. Araya's adolescent-sounding timbre and tone work well for Jessica, while her voices for the rest of the crew sound more mature. Cory Myler narrates the first chapter, the only one not from Jessica's point of view in a switch that feels disjointed. S.S. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

02/27/2023

Space exploration, teleportation, and cloning experiments end in disaster in this heart-pounding thriller by Kirby (A Taste for Monsters). Seventeen-year-old white-cued Jessica Mathers is preparing to teleport to the Theseus, a research facility in orbit around distant planet Carver 1061c, where she will be reunited with her parents, whom she has not seen in six years. In 2199, teleportation involves her body being scanned to an advanced 3-D printer at her destination, upon which its counterpart is destroyed at the point of departure. But instead of emerging on the Theseus, Jessica arrives in a crashed lander on Carver’s surface, seemingly alone. Alternating before and after chapters chronicle the events leading to Jessica’s appearance on Carver and her struggle to survive in the planet’s postapocalyptic landscape. Dual timelines imbued with believable hard science, harrowing action, and strong characterizations permeate Kirby’s breakneck adventure. Questions of personhood are skillfully elevated, explored against an inventive future backdrop in which cloning is the norm and the potential consequences of deceptively simple-sounding procedures come at high costs. Ages 12–up. (Apr.)

From the Publisher

A 2024 Edgar Award Nominee!

A Best Fiction for Young Adults selection• A Kirkus Best Book of the Year • A Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year • A Core Excellence in Young Adult Science Fiction selection

“A twisty mystery of partial truths and unexpected reveals.″ —BCCB

“The expertly juggled storyline nurtures a tension that blossoms into a palpable sense of dread as the downright spooky nature of the disaster is explored. Themes of identity hit hard, as they come with high stakes. An intense, read-in-one-sitting kind of ride.” —Kirkus, starred review

“Dual timelines imbued with believable hard science, harrowing action, and strong characterizations permeate Kirby’s breakneck adventure. Questions of personhood are skillfully elevated, explored against an inventive future backdrop in which cloning is the norm and the potential consequences of deceptively simple-sounding procedures come at high costs.” —Publishers Weekly

School Library Journal

07/01/2023

Gr 9 Up—Jessica Mathers is leaving her life and friends behind, whether she likes it or not, to join her parents on a research mission 14 light years away. But when Jessica wakes up from teleportation—a process where you are scanned and then printed at your destination—she is not on the space station where she was meant to reunite with her parents. Instead, she is in an empty lander crashed on alien soil. Outside is a trail of blood, four freshly dug graves, and someone she could never have expected. Jessica will have to untangle the truths of a terrible disaster and fight to survive a planet with its own dangerous secrets. Chilling and tense, this is a story of deadly unknowns and heart-pounding survival that challenges questions of what makes us who we are. Told in chapters that alternate events before and after the mysterious disaster, the book's pacing and revelations keep readers guessing to the very end. Jessica is a smart and compelling character, deeply sympathetic as she grapples with how little say she has in her own life. Even the small characters feel richly conceived, with interesting back stories lurking just beyond the page. Some readers will be justifiably frustrated with fuzzy or unresolved plot points, but Kirby creates a world that feels both foreign and immediate, pushing readers to examine how much they really understand about the universe. VERDICT An excellent purchase for fans of tense survival, fast-paced horror, and classic science fiction.—Amy Diegelman

APRIL 2023 - AudioFile

Listeners are teleported to the year 2198 as Jennifer Jill Araya portrays the crew aboard the DS THESEUS. Teenager Jessica Mathers is angry at her parents for having left her when she was 11 to do research in space and for making her join them now on a year-long mission to an extinct planet. The cloning and printing technology used for deep-space transportation is supposed to be safe, but corrupt data could mean danger. Araya's adolescent-sounding timbre and tone work well for Jessica, while her voices for the rest of the crew sound more mature. Cory Myler narrates the first chapter, the only one not from Jessica's point of view in a switch that feels disjointed. S.S. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2023-01-25
In a far future with quantum communication and teleportation, something goes terribly wrong.

After 6 years apart, it’s time for 17-year-old Jessica to be reunited with her parents—but at the cost of her life on Earth, as instead of coming home, her parents are making her join them on their interstellar scientific mission on a distant, post-extinction–event world. The teleportation technology destroys the original body and prints a new one at the other end, but when Jessica wakes up expecting to be in orbit, it’s obvious things have gone horribly, violently, lethally awry. Readers explore the mystery as Jessica tries to solve it—and survive—in alternating “before” and “after” chapters. The dual timelines cover both what happened on the ship (deliciously ominous, considering readers know what’s coming) and her struggles on the strange planet as well as the physical and emotional implications of the disaster. The expertly juggled storyline nurtures a tension that blossoms into a palpable sense of dread as the downright spooky nature of the disaster is explored. Themes of identity hit hard, as they come with high stakes. The conclusion results in an open-ended yet satisfying stand-alone novel, though the future setting is well developed enough that readers will hope for more. Though some characters have names that signal ethnic diversity in the supporting cast, most lack physical descriptors and default to White.

An intense, read-in-one-sitting kind of ride. (Science fiction. 12-18)

Product Details

BN ID:	2940175085458
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	04/25/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

The place had been trashed.

Panels were torn from the walls, exposing bundles of tangled wires, and some of the ship’s guts had been ripped out. Cables hung from the openings and snaked across the floor. The few scattered pieces of equipment I could see looked dented and damaged. Even the bulkheads appeared crooked, their edges no longer perfectly joined in the corners.

Then I saw the bed on the floor.

A chill crawled across my shoulders and down my back. It looked like a nest between an outer wall and a control console. There were blankets and a few other random items, like a flashlight and a pile of empty food ration packages. It smelled like a bed, even from across the room. Not terrible, just the familiar, musty odor of sheets that needed to be changed. But that only made it creepier, because it meant that someone had been living in there with me while I was being printed.

That wasn’t how destination ships were supposed to run. This was not how a destination ship was supposed to look. I wondered if there had been a mistake, and they’d sent me to the wrong place, some abandoned or derelict ship, possibly light-­years from where I was supposed to be. That could explain the awareness spreading through every newly printed cell of my body that something was off, physically. Something I couldn’t quite identify.

I looked for anything close by that I could use to cover myself, and right next to the body printer, on a narrow table that pulled down from a bulkhead, I saw underwear, a tank top, and a jumpsuit. Someone had folded them neatly and left them there. For me. A pair of utility boots waited in the shadow of the pull-­down table, along with a pair of compression socks.

I slid down from the body printer to the floor, where I felt and heard the gritty scrape of sand beneath my bare feet. There wasn’t supposed to be dirt on a spaceship, either. But I hurried, shivering, to pull on the underwear and tank top, then snatched up the jumpsuit and unfolded it with a shake. It wasn’t the most comfortable thing, but it was durable because, like all things brought into space, it was meant to be used for a very long time. After I’d put it on, I tugged on the itchy socks and the boots and looked down at myself, toward the floor, and I froze.

The gravity felt wrong. There was too much of it. That was what I had been sensing. It wasn’t until I was standing that I was able to identify the slight but persistent pressure on my feet, the pull on my spine. Stronger gravity could only mean one thing, and I scrambled to the nearest porthole in a panic to look outside.

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