"PIERCING THE CELESTIAL OCEAN: The Saga of the Cerulean Universe Begins" Is A Solid Piece Of Science Fiction

Thank you Kip Koelsch and Goodreads for a free copy and the opportunity to review it.

"Piercing The Celestial Ocean" by Kip Koelsch is pure old fashion science fiction for the most part. It has a very "Star Trek" feel, even down to borrowing Captain Picard's catch phrase, "Make it so" with the captain in this novel. What I think was a unique angle to the story was more of an island setting than a space one and a religion vs science angle.

The book opens with a scientist on a ship coming upon a body of a human he suspects may be a humanoid of some kind coming through a wormhole, and after that brief opening chapter, we are immediately thrown back 600 years earlier.

We first went on a short religious journey which felt more fantasy than science fiction, then later on in another period of time to a crew of scientists coming upon the remains of that journey. The crew finds out there may be a scientific basis to long standing religious beliefs, and tries to set up a mission to go underwater and prove the heavenly beings this religion believes in are actually organic beings.

The two main characters on the mission are , A’zra and G’regor, with a hinted romantic relationship,  and with A'Zra taking charge and being the one to go down in the depths of the ocean.

This novel is hard science fiction, and very well imagined, but more dense than your run of the mill popular science fiction so don't expect a straight page turner, yet it is also an adventure novel so it has that going for it too. There were some times in the book I got a bit confused with the plot, and who was who, and who was dating who, when it came to the little parts with the personal lives of the crew.  I've read dense science fiction before, but can tell you, they make for very thoughtful and detailed reads  but not for page turning reads with a ton of emotional asides. This is true for this book too.

Overall, I liked the novel a lot and it was an overall solid science fiction novel that poses questions about science vs spirituality, and how far one should go for their ideals. It felt a little disjointed in parts, but overall, at the end, it ties together really well. Three stars.

Three stars