According to Brandon Sanderson himself Skyward is a combination of How to Train Your Dragon, Top Gun, and Ender's Game and I can see the influence of each. Spensa's people were forced to land on a deserted world that once belonged to an advanced civilization who left behind an extensive orbital defense system that protected them at the same time it prevented all communication with the rest of humanity. They are under near constant attack by aliens whose nature and motives remain a mystery centuries later. Once they managed to manufacture fighters they started to fight back but in the first critical battle Spensa's father he was labeled a coward and shot down by his own people. She has always dreamed of being a pilot like her father and proving everyone wrong.

Major Bhaajan is a retired soldier working as a P.I. when she returns to the desolate world of her birth. A young nobleman, who in this matriarchal society has lived his entire life in seclusion, has gone missing and the police can't find his trail because he disappeared into the ruins and caves beneath the city. The City of Cries believes the Undercity to be nothing more than a slum but to Bhaajan it's the home she both loves and hates. Locating the missing prince is only the beginning and it's time for an intergalactic empire to realize that their greatest resource is dying from neglect right under their feet.