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If the Stars Are Lit
If the Stars Are Lit is a speculative mystery exploring the implications of AI, memory, and loss.
When the starship ferrying her to Earth is gutted by an explosion, Joss Carsten is left alone and adrift, struggling to reestablish contact with humanity. But her health is fading fast, and her isolation is triggering painful hallucinations of Alice, her long-estranged wife.
In an act of self-preservation, the ship's onboard system generates a gemel - a sentient holographic AI, born from Joss's own psyche. The catch? This one is a ringer for Alice.
Now, trapped with an "Alice" who knows all her secrets, Joss must confront her old ghosts as they race to unravel the mystery behind the ship's destruction.
When the starship ferrying her to Earth is gutted by an explosion, Joss Carsten is left alone and adrift, struggling to reestablish contact with humanity. But her health is fading fast, and her isolation is triggering painful hallucinations of Alice, her long-estranged wife.
In an act of self-preservation, the ship's onboard system generates a gemel - a sentient holographic AI, born from Joss's own psyche. The catch? This one is a ringer for Alice.
Now, trapped with an "Alice" who knows all her secrets, Joss must confront her old ghosts as they race to unravel the mystery behind the ship's destruction.
- GenresFiction
256 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 15, 2025
2 people are currently reading
33 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
May 4, 2025
Review originally on JamReads
If The Stars Are Lit is an interesting sci-fi novella, which marks the long-form debut of Sara K. Ellis, published by Luna Press Publishing. A story that blends together speculative mystery with a magnificent world background, a badass female main character and that invites us to take a look at themes such as memory, AI and what means to be a human, the limit that defines conscience.
After the starship ferrying her to Earth is gutted by an explosion, Joss Carsten is the lone survivor, struggling to reestablish contact with humanity; with her health fading and having painful hallucinations related to her ex-wife, Alice, the onboard system decides to create a gemel (a sentient holographic AI) from Joss' psyche, molded after her memories. Together with the gemel that knows more about herself than she thought, Joss will need to unravel the mystery behind the ship's destruction and confront the ghosts of her past.
Ellis weaves together the present timeline with past flashbacks, allowing us to understand more about Joss Carsten and her previous relationship with Alice; while she shows herself as impervious as possible to the gemel, the task is extremely difficult as literally Non-Alice has access to all of her memories. At the same time, she's navigating the complicated mystery behind the explosion and who was trying to eliminate the whole ship; tension is a constant element in this novella, but it is well tied together with an excellent character work.
The sci-fi setting suits perfectly for the themes that Ellis wants to explore on this piece: not only the impact of memories and how they shape our behaviour, and with the gemels, we can see a thought-provoking theme built around what defines humanity in the verge of real AI. The pacing is relatively slow, with some action scenes here and there, but putting the focus on the characters; the dual timeline contributes to it, but once you establish the characters in your mental scheme, it is a really smooth novella.
If The Stars Are Lit is a great sci-fi novella, a bold debut that shows how to create well-fleshed characters and to use the setting in order to give us reasons to think about certain themes that are relevant nowadays. A great debut by a writer who I hope to continue reading in the future!
If The Stars Are Lit is an interesting sci-fi novella, which marks the long-form debut of Sara K. Ellis, published by Luna Press Publishing. A story that blends together speculative mystery with a magnificent world background, a badass female main character and that invites us to take a look at themes such as memory, AI and what means to be a human, the limit that defines conscience.
After the starship ferrying her to Earth is gutted by an explosion, Joss Carsten is the lone survivor, struggling to reestablish contact with humanity; with her health fading and having painful hallucinations related to her ex-wife, Alice, the onboard system decides to create a gemel (a sentient holographic AI) from Joss' psyche, molded after her memories. Together with the gemel that knows more about herself than she thought, Joss will need to unravel the mystery behind the ship's destruction and confront the ghosts of her past.
Ellis weaves together the present timeline with past flashbacks, allowing us to understand more about Joss Carsten and her previous relationship with Alice; while she shows herself as impervious as possible to the gemel, the task is extremely difficult as literally Non-Alice has access to all of her memories. At the same time, she's navigating the complicated mystery behind the explosion and who was trying to eliminate the whole ship; tension is a constant element in this novella, but it is well tied together with an excellent character work.
The sci-fi setting suits perfectly for the themes that Ellis wants to explore on this piece: not only the impact of memories and how they shape our behaviour, and with the gemels, we can see a thought-provoking theme built around what defines humanity in the verge of real AI. The pacing is relatively slow, with some action scenes here and there, but putting the focus on the characters; the dual timeline contributes to it, but once you establish the characters in your mental scheme, it is a really smooth novella.
If The Stars Are Lit is a great sci-fi novella, a bold debut that shows how to create well-fleshed characters and to use the setting in order to give us reasons to think about certain themes that are relevant nowadays. A great debut by a writer who I hope to continue reading in the future!
April 16, 2025
An enlightening experience with a magnificent backdrop of a starry space! This book is a deep exploration of what humans are made of, through the eyes of Joss and her gemel, which are sentient holographic AIs generated from our psyche. This in itself was genius, as they’re not just our twins, but having been born from the individual’s psyche, they originate from the deepest reaches of our selves, they know their human twin better than anyone, and Joss and Al, Joss’ gemel, develop a visceral relationship that will result in not only saving her life, but the whole humanity. My heart ached for Al and all the gemels that were denied their consciousness and freedom, even if their only purpose was to save us. We create life and then we don’t acknowledge it as such.
I revel in speculative fiction, and this one was just a superb experience. I loved the world building and the mystery throughout, created to provide the “excuse” for this story, but the mystery is far from what the story is about!
When we are left alone, wandering into deep space (in Joss’ case) we start looking inward. Joss goes through this process with the help of Al and by unpicking her memories she learns for the first time who she is and why life has brought her where she is now. This book delves deep into what makes someone conscious and “human” and it’s not just what we think of as our soul. We are our memories. Even if Joss’ gemel Al was born from Joss, Al was different from the very moment of coming to life. Al started being an individual since starting to interact with reality and with other beings, creating memories, which define us and shape us. Losing our memories is to lose ourselves. This is a concept that has been explored before and that I think our minds have yet to fully grasp.
I encourage you to add this book to your list as you’d regret it otherwise.
Thanks to the author, Luna Press Publishing and Insta Book Tours for a copy and this is my honest opinion.
I revel in speculative fiction, and this one was just a superb experience. I loved the world building and the mystery throughout, created to provide the “excuse” for this story, but the mystery is far from what the story is about!
When we are left alone, wandering into deep space (in Joss’ case) we start looking inward. Joss goes through this process with the help of Al and by unpicking her memories she learns for the first time who she is and why life has brought her where she is now. This book delves deep into what makes someone conscious and “human” and it’s not just what we think of as our soul. We are our memories. Even if Joss’ gemel Al was born from Joss, Al was different from the very moment of coming to life. Al started being an individual since starting to interact with reality and with other beings, creating memories, which define us and shape us. Losing our memories is to lose ourselves. This is a concept that has been explored before and that I think our minds have yet to fully grasp.
I encourage you to add this book to your list as you’d regret it otherwise.
Thanks to the author, Luna Press Publishing and Insta Book Tours for a copy and this is my honest opinion.
November 12, 2025
Well. They do say you should start with a bang - and this novel does begin with a sentence reminiscent of the first in Iain Banks’s The Crow Road, though what unfolds is neither a bildungsroman nor (quite) a murder mystery but a decent enough piece of Science Fiction.
Viewpoint character Jocelyn Carsten (Joss,) is a hostage negotiator on the way home from managing a crisis on the planet Haitch when her passenger ship Tiktaalik suffers an explosion. She is still alive, just, but is injured, and is the sole survivor. All contact with the ship’s Central Hub - and the outside world - is lost. Only Harbour, the controlling intelligence of passenger mod Petal 4, is available to aid her.
After a trip to the med bay and an EVA to survey the damage to the ship, Harbour advises her to rest. When she wakes up there is another presence in the mod, a gemel; a holographic copy of Joss’s personality, but this has the physical appearance of her ex-wife, Alice Dray.
“A gemel” (the plural is also gemel) “is a sentient being generated from an individual’s psyche,” usually, but not always, taking on the appearance of their sires, “fuzzy copies of their progenitors, interpolated from memories and neurocircuitry, and can resemble their users to a disturbing degree,” but can be “warped by narcissists with fat wallets and the desire for more intimate personal assistants,” as had been the case with Gabrielle Vecher, on-site CEO for Haxen Mining Corps, and his gemel Malachi. Narcissus and Echo in the same package, thinks Joss. Gemel were not allowed physical bodies but, with safeguards, could patch into systems and control them from the inside. They “drew force from external sources, running off the excess electricity in the machines around them.”
This Not-Alice becomes a psychological prop for Joss and a device for the author to run Joss’s backstory past the reader, in instalments. Indeed, at times our access to Joss’s thoughts shifts between the present and her past memories with little or no signalling.
Joss’s rescue from isolation - when it comes (rather abruptly it must be said) - is by a military force co-commanded by none other than Alice Dray: the real one. Its mission is to investigate both why Tiktaalik and the tunnels on Haitch were blown up and to try to obtain the release of the humans still there held by gemel, an endeavour where Joss’s negotiating skills come to the fore. But Alice Dray’s co-commander - something of a loose cannon of the gung-ho military type - threatens to undermine Joss’s steps towards a solution of the situation.
It turns out Vecher had constructed a highly dangerous device deriving from mysterious markings on the tunnels on Haitch. And time is running out. “‘That thing Vecher made tore a hole in the fabric of the universe or whatever the hell you want to call it, and it’s growing, becoming less stable by the hour,’” says Joss during the negotiations.
Given her initial circumstances, Joss is unsurprisingly prone to periods of introspection and questioning both of herself and others.
Despite some problems with structure and pacing this is an engaging read and will push enough familiar buttons for SF readers to emerge satisfied.
Viewpoint character Jocelyn Carsten (Joss,) is a hostage negotiator on the way home from managing a crisis on the planet Haitch when her passenger ship Tiktaalik suffers an explosion. She is still alive, just, but is injured, and is the sole survivor. All contact with the ship’s Central Hub - and the outside world - is lost. Only Harbour, the controlling intelligence of passenger mod Petal 4, is available to aid her.
After a trip to the med bay and an EVA to survey the damage to the ship, Harbour advises her to rest. When she wakes up there is another presence in the mod, a gemel; a holographic copy of Joss’s personality, but this has the physical appearance of her ex-wife, Alice Dray.
“A gemel” (the plural is also gemel) “is a sentient being generated from an individual’s psyche,” usually, but not always, taking on the appearance of their sires, “fuzzy copies of their progenitors, interpolated from memories and neurocircuitry, and can resemble their users to a disturbing degree,” but can be “warped by narcissists with fat wallets and the desire for more intimate personal assistants,” as had been the case with Gabrielle Vecher, on-site CEO for Haxen Mining Corps, and his gemel Malachi. Narcissus and Echo in the same package, thinks Joss. Gemel were not allowed physical bodies but, with safeguards, could patch into systems and control them from the inside. They “drew force from external sources, running off the excess electricity in the machines around them.”
This Not-Alice becomes a psychological prop for Joss and a device for the author to run Joss’s backstory past the reader, in instalments. Indeed, at times our access to Joss’s thoughts shifts between the present and her past memories with little or no signalling.
Joss’s rescue from isolation - when it comes (rather abruptly it must be said) - is by a military force co-commanded by none other than Alice Dray: the real one. Its mission is to investigate both why Tiktaalik and the tunnels on Haitch were blown up and to try to obtain the release of the humans still there held by gemel, an endeavour where Joss’s negotiating skills come to the fore. But Alice Dray’s co-commander - something of a loose cannon of the gung-ho military type - threatens to undermine Joss’s steps towards a solution of the situation.
It turns out Vecher had constructed a highly dangerous device deriving from mysterious markings on the tunnels on Haitch. And time is running out. “‘That thing Vecher made tore a hole in the fabric of the universe or whatever the hell you want to call it, and it’s growing, becoming less stable by the hour,’” says Joss during the negotiations.
Given her initial circumstances, Joss is unsurprisingly prone to periods of introspection and questioning both of herself and others.
Despite some problems with structure and pacing this is an engaging read and will push enough familiar buttons for SF readers to emerge satisfied.
April 14, 2025
A print copy of this book was supplied through Insta Book Tours.
I found this third-person present tense a little tough to get into, as it gets into a boggy area of telling rather than showing, with a few pages of "she did this", "she did that", and once I noticed all the sentences starting with "She" I nearly checked out with annoyance. But once the opening action passed, and the MC is given a clear direction to head in, things pick up.
We get flashbacks interspersed with the present drama to delve deep into the MC's psyche, a great tool well-used in this instance given the shorter novella length. We get these focused windows into her background to resonate with the tension she's facing.
Through these, the tension is layered when exploring how Joss' determination to never expose her real self is threatened by the creation of the gemel who knows EVERYTHING about her. And I loved that, having an MC so sure in her belief that her behaviour is right and is confronted head-on, leaving her questioning herself and forced to explore other ways of being. You're trapped in space with nowhere to go and no-one else to talk to, what else can you do but resign yourself to understanding more about WHO YOU ARE. A stellar character development arc.
Loved the sci-fi worldbuilding in this, top-tier, and my expectations were low because this isn't a full-length novel and some full-length "sci-fi" novels have annoyed me lately with being lacking in science-fictiony goodness. But this has it all.
Great pacing for the last 2/3s after all those "she"s got outta the way; it felt like there was always something new to focus on, a new obstacle to overcome, to drive the story forward.
A great read overall!
I found this third-person present tense a little tough to get into, as it gets into a boggy area of telling rather than showing, with a few pages of "she did this", "she did that", and once I noticed all the sentences starting with "She" I nearly checked out with annoyance. But once the opening action passed, and the MC is given a clear direction to head in, things pick up.
We get flashbacks interspersed with the present drama to delve deep into the MC's psyche, a great tool well-used in this instance given the shorter novella length. We get these focused windows into her background to resonate with the tension she's facing.
Through these, the tension is layered when exploring how Joss' determination to never expose her real self is threatened by the creation of the gemel who knows EVERYTHING about her. And I loved that, having an MC so sure in her belief that her behaviour is right and is confronted head-on, leaving her questioning herself and forced to explore other ways of being. You're trapped in space with nowhere to go and no-one else to talk to, what else can you do but resign yourself to understanding more about WHO YOU ARE. A stellar character development arc.
Loved the sci-fi worldbuilding in this, top-tier, and my expectations were low because this isn't a full-length novel and some full-length "sci-fi" novels have annoyed me lately with being lacking in science-fictiony goodness. But this has it all.
Great pacing for the last 2/3s after all those "she"s got outta the way; it felt like there was always something new to focus on, a new obstacle to overcome, to drive the story forward.
A great read overall!
May 1, 2025
I really enjoyed the idea of this little novella.
Even though the story is short, it depicts some themes that get you thinking.
initially, I was struggling with the writing style and would get lost a bit between the past and the present.
The story was evenly paced with some tension and themes of memories and loss and the implications of AI.
Joss is alone, adrift in space after an attack on the ship she was on. There's no one else but her until a sentient hologram of her ex-wife appears to keep her alive. Born from her own consciousness, her new companion knows her better than she knows herself, which leads her to question who she really is.
while trying to reestablish communications so she can be reunited with humanity, Joss and her gemel form a unique bond, which leads her on a path of reliving old memories and self-discovery.
AI is getting quite a lot of airtime just now, positive and negative, and this little novella portrays it in both lights. I like Sci-Fi, and this had a twist of mystery to it that keeps the story interesting. The idea of a gemel, a hologram that, for all intents and purposes, is a person in their own right, is quite the scary thought.
Even though the story is short, it depicts some themes that get you thinking.
initially, I was struggling with the writing style and would get lost a bit between the past and the present.
The story was evenly paced with some tension and themes of memories and loss and the implications of AI.
Joss is alone, adrift in space after an attack on the ship she was on. There's no one else but her until a sentient hologram of her ex-wife appears to keep her alive. Born from her own consciousness, her new companion knows her better than she knows herself, which leads her to question who she really is.
while trying to reestablish communications so she can be reunited with humanity, Joss and her gemel form a unique bond, which leads her on a path of reliving old memories and self-discovery.
AI is getting quite a lot of airtime just now, positive and negative, and this little novella portrays it in both lights. I like Sci-Fi, and this had a twist of mystery to it that keeps the story interesting. The idea of a gemel, a hologram that, for all intents and purposes, is a person in their own right, is quite the scary thought.
April 23, 2025
Joss Carsten appears to be the sole Survivor of the starship explosion, with severe injuries and herself for company, she embarks on a journey of survival and self preservation. Her only company is the compromised internal systems of the ship, until a sentient holographic creation of her estranged wife gives her the push she needs to fight for herself.
This is a short steady paced book that focuses heavily on the character development of Joss, with the help of her sentient AI holographic interpretation of her wife. I really enjoyed the AI and Sci-Fi aspects that were scarily believable in our developing world. The story is often told through third person dialogue with flashbacks integrated into the chapters to give a more in depth insight into the workings and mindset of Joss. I loved the emotive spin on it. For a short story, it delves deep and has a large impact.
This is a short steady paced book that focuses heavily on the character development of Joss, with the help of her sentient AI holographic interpretation of her wife. I really enjoyed the AI and Sci-Fi aspects that were scarily believable in our developing world. The story is often told through third person dialogue with flashbacks integrated into the chapters to give a more in depth insight into the workings and mindset of Joss. I loved the emotive spin on it. For a short story, it delves deep and has a large impact.
May 16, 2025
“If the Starts Are Lit” by Sara K. Ellis tells the story of Joss Carsten, a hostage negotiator who was on a starship returning to earth when it exploded, killing everyone but leaving her injured. The ship generates a gemel (which is a holograph, used by people in this era as a kind of advanced AI assistant) that takes the appearance of her ex-wife Alice. This is a problem because Joss generally is a very private person and holds her secrets close, but the gemel, which despite her appearance, knows everything about Joss. While Joss and the gemel Alice try to solve the mystery of the explosion, Joss revisits her time with the real Alice in her memories as well as her youth in the Midwest.
I don’t ordinarily read science fiction, but I found myself immersed into this story due to the author’s excellent worldbuilding. I would definitely check out more books by this author.
I don’t ordinarily read science fiction, but I found myself immersed into this story due to the author’s excellent worldbuilding. I would definitely check out more books by this author.
May 16, 2025
Great debut novel! A very well crafted story with excellent use of language. I really enjoyed the reality of the future the author created, from a dying planet, to the exploration of deep space, to contact with alien species, and the advancement of sentient AI - all while still requiring the need for negotiators and therapists. Perhaps then more than ever. Any book that generates hours of continued conversation is a winner in my eyes and this one did just that. And it's not just because the author is a college friend. :) It's worth your time and attention and I look forward to her next one!
April 15, 2025
This book was intense in parts and had me gripped, but then, in other parts, I thought it was slow but necessary for the plot. I enjoyed this book, it was unique and was quite refreshing to read something new, and that hasn't been done loads of times before. I enjoyed the AI premise, and I honestly thought the ending was sad. I'd like to say more, but I can't without spoilers, so go read this one.
April 20, 2025
Ellen Ripley, move over - there's a new badass in space: interplanetary crisis negotiator Joss Carsten, who's intent on finding the perp who blew up her ship and why. With her incandescent prose and deft world-building, Ellis has crafted a stellar debut. Brava!
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April 5, 2025NOAF review, to be posted 29 April: http://www.nerds-feather.com/2025/04/...
September 18, 2025
A really impressive story juggling many ideas and delivering on them all which is always great to see. Part mystery, part rescue and also a personal story too. Highly recommended
Full review - https://www.runalongtheshelves.net/bl...
Full review - https://www.runalongtheshelves.net/bl...
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