Teaser Tuesday: Defy the Stars by Claudia Gray

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by Ambrosia of The Purple Booker.
To play along just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Defy the Stars by Claudia Grays.

Defy the Stars –
Little, Brown and Company

He isn’t supposed to hope. Not like humans do.
— Chapter 2

Are we responsible for this? We can’t be. We’re the good guys.
Aren’t we?
— Chapter 13

In honour of InSight safely landing on Mars … right, who am I kidding, my reading pile has absolutely nothing to do with the NASA Mars mission but it sounded nice. And the more we explore space the less improbable things like what happens in this book appear.
Usually, plots similar to this one would start with humanity being in need of help and Earth being depicted as the victim. Toss that notion right overboard because in this case, there is humanity and then there’s Earth, and humanity from Earth is the aggressor after the planet has been grazed. Civilisations on other planets have to pay tribute because of the whole cradle of humanity thing. And then there are those planets that try to fight this. And one of those skirmishes is exactly where the plot drops you. And also right in the situation that apparently there are androids that are almost perfectly human … but they are androids and therefore have no feelings. Right?
The premise here is twofold: What if anything makes someone/-thing human and can two entities that are at an unlikely impasse work together with different but ultimately similar goals? The mortal enemies to trust to more has been done before but this story is so nuanced in its exploration of what it means to feel and be conscious that to me it ventures beyond that worn out path. I’m not really a fan of sci-fi and space travel and the like generally make me more likely to close a book than continue reading it yet here the different planets even if only visited briefly had such a specific quality to them that it was more an added bonus than anything else to me. Well, and then there’s the end … or should I say that part where I’m extremely glad that the following book is already available?

I used to want to become an astronaut … mostly for the reason that I thought zero gravity would be incredibly cool. Maybe not the best motivator. Would you want to space travel if it were (relatively) easily possible? Share your thoughts and teasers in the comments!