Humanity has made the leap to interstellar travel in Yume Kitasei’s The Stardust Grail, but not through their own ingenuity or technology. Without the interstellar web, humans and other species will be cut off from each other. Trade will collapse. Colonies will starve. And no one has a clue what to do when the nodes of that web start to die. The race is on to find out how to keep the web running and graduate student Maya Hoshimoto is caught in the middle.
Maya is used to being viewed askance by other humans. She was born on a far-flung colony. Her best friend for years is an alien Frenro. She knows so much more than the people she’s studying with at Princeton University. (It’s very funny that she can point out which objects the university receives as donations to their museum are just so much everyday junk.) The museum’s exhibits remind her of her life as a thief. She used to work with her friend Auncle to steal things from museums. Auncle is on a quest to find a “grail,” an extremely rare object from the lost Frenro home world. Without the grails, the already decimated Frenro population can’t reproduce. Even worse, humans believe that the grail might be what humanity needs to take over the interstellar web for themselves.
Maya, being human and a friend to the Frenro (and with complicated thoughts about humanity due to the war she lived through), has some hard decisions to make. I deeply appreciated the way that Kitasei transplanted the question of repatriating stolen artifacts to the descendants of colonized peoples into the far future. Museum curators, government officials, and academics have a long list of arguments for hanging on to looted items—safety, preservation, access—but I always wonder about the ethics. In the United States, we have the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (passed in 1990) to help indigenous peoples keep and reclaim the remains of their ancestors and other artifacts, but I don’t know how effective this law has been. I daresay there are a lot of cases tied up in courts and items still tucked away in museums and at universities that should be reclaimed. Kitasei complicates this thorny problem by placing Maya in the position of damning one species or the other. Without the grail, the Frenro will die. Without the grail, humanity’s colonies will be cut off from each other without a glimmer of the technology needed to achieve interstellar travel.
The Stardust Grail ends abruptly. The ending isn’t ambiguous, but there’s no denouement for us readers to emotionally recover from the extremely tense climax. Not only does the book just end, it left me wanting to know a lot more about the worlds and peoples Maya and Auncle visit. I relished learning more about the universe Kitasei created, as well as the very interesting character development around secondary characters like Medix (an AI robot who wants to become fully sentient, though no one really knows what that means) and Wil (a former soldier for the army that fought in the brutal war that resulted in the colonies achieving independence). There is a lot of rich ground that Kitasei could’ve mined more deeply.