Starsight — Skyward Book Two

Behind Enemy Lines

Skyward spent its entire length establishing the Krell as an existential threat — a faceless alien force that destroys any human pilot who attempts to flee the battlefield. Starsight immediately complicates this picture. Spensa’s cytonic abilities allow her to communicate across space, and when she receives an alien transmission, she uses it to infiltrate the Superiority — the interstellar polity that controls the Krell — as a pilot trainee from a subject species.

The undercover structure is the right choice for a series that has been building toward the question “what do the Krell actually want?” It forces Spensa to engage with the answer personally rather than discovering it as external information, which is a better narrative solution and a more uncomfortable one.

The Superiority

The alien cultures of the Superiority are Starsight’s greatest achievement. Rather than building a monolithic enemy species, Sanderson creates a coalition of multiple alien peoples, each with distinct physiologies and cultures, united by a shared political philosophy — that “aggressor species” (including humans) are too dangerous to be allowed interstellar travel. The irony that the Superiority considers humanity irredeemably aggressive while conducting a multi-generation war of suppression against them is not lost on Spensa, and her attempts to articulate this to herself while maintaining her cover is where the book does its best character work.

Brade — the other human-seeming pilot in Spensa’s flight group — is the series’ most morally complex character, someone who has genuinely internalized the Superiority’s values and uses them as a weapon against her own species.

What the Krell Are

The revelation of the Krell’s actual nature — remote-piloted drones, not independent beings — fundamentally changes the moral calculus of every battle in Skyward. Spensa has been celebrating her kills; now she understands what she has actually been killing, and what the humans who fight alongside her have been doing. This is a more sophisticated ethical complication than most YA military fiction attempts, and Sanderson gives it the weight it deserves.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — A confident expansion that rewards series investment with moral complexity, alien world-building, and a protagonist forced to genuinely understand her enemies.

Reading Guides

• Brandon Sanderson Books in Order: The Complete Cosmere Reading Guide (2026)

First Contact and the Ethics of Classification

Starsight is, among other things, a first-contact novel — a genre that asks what happens when humanity meets genuinely alien intelligence and finds that the encounter reframes everything humanity thought it knew about itself. The specific twist Sanderson applies is that the “first contact” has already happened: humanity has been at war with the Superiority for generations, and the encounter has been defined entirely by violence on both sides.

The first-contact question the novel actually asks is therefore different: not “what do we do when we meet aliens?” but “what do we do when we discover that everything we believed about the aliens we’ve been fighting was conditioned by our own side’s propaganda?” This is a more uncomfortable question, and Sanderson lets it be uncomfortable rather than resolving it quickly.

The Dioxyn and Alien Biodiversity

The alien species within the Superiority are one of Starsight’s genuine achievements. Rather than positing a single dominant alien species that humanity fights, Sanderson creates a coalition of multiple species with different physiologies, cultures, and relationships to the war. The dioxyn, the varvax, the figments — each represents a different kind of sentient life, with different ways of experiencing and understanding the conflict.

This biodiversity serves the novel’s political argument: the Superiority’s suppression of “aggressor species” is not a simple xenophobia but a political philosophy with institutional structures, proponents with genuine beliefs, and beneficiaries who have reasons to maintain it. The variety of species within the coalition demonstrates that the suppression is not about species difference but about the willingness of those in power to use their power to prevent potential challenges to it.

Cytonic Abilities as Threat

The specific reason the Superiority fears and suppresses cytonic abilities — the power to communicate and travel through hyperspace — is revealed in Starsight to be both practical and ideological. Cytonics can travel without the Superiority’s approval, communicate without the Superiority’s monitoring, and understand the nature of the Delvers — the ancient entities that the Superiority has learned to manage through specific protocols. A cytonic who understands the Delvers is a security risk.

This is a clean piece of science-fictional world-building: the alien empire’s political structure depends on controlling a specific resource (faster-than-light travel), and the cytonics represent a threat to that monopoly. The political suppression of cytonic ability is therefore rational within the Superiority’s self-interest, even when it involves harming beings who are not actually threatening anyone.

What Spensa Brings Back

The understanding that Spensa gains in the Superiority — about the Krell, about cytonic abilities, about what the war actually is — is not simply information. It is a fundamental change in her relationship to her own context, her own society’s claims, her own understanding of what she has been fighting and why. The Spensa who returns to Detritus at the end of Starsight is not the Spensa who left, and the series is honest about the difficulty of bringing back that kind of changed perspective.

The Undercover Structure and Series Pace

Starsight is the Skyward series at its most structurally ambitious and, for some readers, its least satisfying moment — the book that trades the breakneck pace of Skyward for something slower and more observational. The undercover genre demands patience: Spensa cannot simply act, must watch and learn and build cover, must resist her natural impulse toward direct confrontation.

Sanderson manages this tension competently. The slower sequences earn their place because the information they deliver is load-bearing for everything that follows. Readers who commit to the different pace will find Starsight more rewarding on reread, when the purpose of each element is visible in retrospect. First-time readers who trust the series will find the patience rewarded before the final chapter.