Fractal Noise
This is a story about grief.
I've been reading Christopher Paolini's books since I was a kid. In fact, I was reading the Eragon books at the same time that I was reading my now-beloved Lord Of The Rings books. "Now-beloved" because, spoiler, I liked Eragon better back in elementary school. LOTR was far less accessible than Eragon and co, in terms of complexity of the English and clarity of the action. Plus, the dragons were cooler and the magic was more overt.
He's grown up at the same rate as I have, and his writing has matured a lot. With time and focus I was able to come to revere Tolkien the appropriate amount (entirely) and he was able to start writing about more than the existing stories that influenced him (including Tolkien, but also Star Wars and half a dozen others).
His immediate-prior book, To Sleep In A Sea Of Stars, was not a book that demonstrated that maturity. It was far too long and despite only featuring a single character's point of view, managed to carry threads with echoes of such diverse stories as Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, and Alien. I think it overstayed any welcome I would have provided.
When you're being influenced by others' stories, your writing gets longer. You are taking someone else's narrative, blending your own emotional resonances with the author's, and then layering in your own narrative and, finally, threading in the emotional message you want to send. TSiaSoS had exactly this problem. Too many stories in the storybook. (I'm in wild agreement with John Green that stories belong to the readers, not the authors, to be clear, but good stories still have their author's fingerprints on the other side of a campfire retelling.)
Fractal Noise is the second book published in the series, and is a prequel that expands on a single throwaway piece of worldbuilding in Sea. It's also the thinnest book I've ever read by him. Stars told a grand adventure story in the far future of our interstellar society coming into contact with alien life, while the narrator comes to terms with the loss of their partner and the cost of war and how to build a resilient society scattered across multimonth journeys between worlds, with a little of Eragon's "alien, psychic pair-bonded companion" thrown in for good measure. Stars wraps up so far from where it started in terms of scope and cosmology, that a direct continuation of it would inherently start in the range of implausible and have to go downhill from there.
But Fractal Noise? This is a story about grief.
Not grief in the context Battlestar, not remorse with a backdrop of Fellowship. Just grief.
I think the thing I liked most about Sleep was the scifi technology of the humans, forming warp bubbles to travel faster than light but only when at the far edges of stellar gravity wells, while brain-in-a-jar "natural AI"s manage the ships and extensive cybernetic augmentation is integrated. The scifi is there too in Fractal Noise, but with none of the decoding the motivations of deeply foreign alien squids as a motivating plot thread that descends into an on-foot blaster battle in an ancient alien city.
The characters are on a spaceship for what feels like a single chapter. The rest of it they're on foot on a sandblasted planet walking towards unfathomably powerful hole in the ground. It's Paolini's first bottle episode, and the most important part isn't the scifi, the walking, or the hole.
This is, after all, a story about grief.
Our main character walks a tremendous through a howling gale carrying the memories of his dead wife to a hole in the ground that's so permanent as to boggle the mind. The metaphor is not subtle, and the veil of authorial deniability is thrown out the window in the final pages as the mission comes to a conclusion.
My copy had a brief post-text note from Christopher that outlined how Noise was actually the book he wanted to write first, but he put it down and built the world in Stars before coming back to tell the actual story that was in his head. His next book after this one was a sequel to the Eragon books, and I gather that book did not embrace brevity as much as this one did. A shame.
If you've read Stars and you're wondering if this one is worth the read, the answer is yes. If you bounced off of it, this one might be worth a read out of spite, and you might come away with a higher opinion. I know I did.
A lot of Paolini's protagonists grapple with obstacles none of his readers will ever have to grapple with. Facing down evil emperors, or fending off an alien invasion, or navigating the politics of elf kingdoms, none of these are particularly relatable. But Fractal Noise has the most relatable character of all, because this is a story about his grief, and it's also a story about your grief.