The Death of Sleep by Anne McCaffrey and Jody Lynn Nye is the second book in the Planet Pirates series set in the Ireta Universe. The main character in this book is Lunzie Mespila medic who is mentioned in each of the previous three books in this universe. This book deals with the backstory which occurs before the events which are detailed in Dinosaur Planet. The story begins as Lunzie takes a job as a doctor on a asteroid mining platform leaving her daughter behind. However the ship has an accident and she is left in cold sleep for sixty two years. The main theme of the story is the way that in many ways the fact that she leaves society for such large time periods it is like everything which she connects to dies and she must constantly find herself adopting to new worlds and finding her place in them. While I have never been left out of time like she has I can connect to the difficulty of adopting into a different society as where I grew up was much different than the urban society I live in today. While many would say that where I live now is not really foreign to me it seems almost more exotic than the land of Korea where I lived for some months. In this story Lunzie has multiple times where she is pushed back in time but she discovers that some places are not meant for her even though they are livable. I disagreed at times which the very insulting way that the urban conservatives where portrayed but I can see many of the problems in those who I interact with today. People have a tendency to push for meaningless goals and have lives pushing for unneeded things. In the book duty to society calls Lunzie to live a more full life and maybe some day I will also find some society which is worth serving.
Dear Anne:I usually seek out women authors, especially in the male dominated field of science fiction. When I buy a highly reccommended book that's part of a series and then discover the author/publisher has put out a book without an ENDING, sorry Anne, but if you don't respect me enough to write a complete stand alone story I'm never going to buy the next one in the "series", or for that matter, any other books from you!It's high school english after all. A book is supposed to have a beginning, middle, and ENDING!I'd read "Sassinak", book one of the "series", and while the ending wasn't that great at least it had one. After hitting page 380 of this book to discover I'd been screwed I will treat you just as a would a male author. You're now on my blacklist. My library had no shortage os "series", but they are series of COMPLETE BOOKS that were so interesting and compelling I wanted to to spend more time with the author. Many of the authors introduce these books saying ,"While this book is part of a series, it's also a "stand alone" novel.", demonstrating respect for their readers and understanding of the definition of a "book". Goodbye Anne
Depending upon what way you look at it, this is either the first or the second book in the trilogy. Either way it is well worth the read. This was written back in the day when Anne McCaffrey was fostering new authors, and co-authoring books with them. Ah, the last glory days of Anne McCaffrey before the slide in quality she finally started to have in her writing. At any rate, this is a great book typical of this era of science fiction writing, and has long been one of my favorites. I actually own a copy of this book, but it is currently buried in storage so I checked out a copy from the library instead of trying to dig it out of storage. Books like this I tend to return to every few years simply because they are such a joy for me to read. They aren't heavy on the military or the combat, though there is some of both, and are heavy on character interaction and character growth, both of which are things I tend to enjoy in my reading material.
—Jeffrey
When this series first came out in 1990, it was very important to me as a young woman looking for strong female role models of a sort in the fiction I read. It does not stand up to re-reading pretty much in any way. Which is too bad, because the idea behind it --how to cope when you've been revived from inadvertant and unplanned 'cold sleep' missing decades, is a great one. As is 'have MD and spacesuit, will travel'. But this feels slow, occasionally disjointed, slightly bigoted (one of the villians is an oversized lesbian thug), and dull. The plot plods along relying on explosions and overt bad guys for drama instead of the drama already inherant in the situation.
—Sunny
Well that was a painful read. The writing style flowed well, as all McCaffrey novels do, but the story itself was terrible. A shame as I loved Sassinak. In the end I can't help but wonder what was the point of the entire thing? The only benefit at the last page was that she was now part of an intelligence agency and they would spend more effort searching for her, and they are on this mysterious planet that seems to be created purely as an ancient Earth historic preservation area. Plus the myster
—D.M.
