TRIGGER WARNINGS: Speech impediment, Breaking the law, Racism, Swearing (f word), Abuse, Commentary on motherhood/parenting, Animal cruelty, Death of dogs/animals, Eating dogs, Anxiety, Trauma

TAGS: Lgbtqia+, Diverse, Sci-Fi

Thank you to Hachette Australia for supplying the e-arc via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

★★★★☆

This one really pulled on my heartstrings but I definitely didn’t enjoy it as much as I did book 1. That being said, I did read book 3 pretty much immediately after finishing it.

So, book 1 was a really fun mix of The Raven Cycle and Spacenerds which was really fun to read about. Book two is significantly different to the first! Book 1 is a fun found-family story, book 2 is a sadder story that focuses more on what it means to be human which is totally dramatic but oh well. Book 3 is a totally different story but I’ll save that for further down in this review.

I definitely enjoyed book 1 more than this, but I’m still glad that I read it. I enjoyed all the characters and once again, this is definitely more of a character story than a plot-based one. I really loved exploring Lovey’s story but I much prefer the other story throughout the book because I really think I find survival stories much more interesting, especially when the main character is so smart!

I still think that this trilogy shouldn’t have been a companion trilogy and that this book could have been cut into two shorter novellas and the small plot from book one could’ve been turned into a really interesting duology.

A decent enough read. It lags a little in places but that could be because most of my recent scifi consumption has been on TV. Also bit YA in nature so not one for your hardcore scifiers.

I read and enjoyed the first novel in this series, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, but I didn't love it. There were a lot of great ideas, and a lot of potential for the universe and characters, but ultimately it felt very much to me as though too much had been shoehorned into the book.

A Closed and Common Orbit is technically a sequel, but stands well enough on its own that a reader could easily pick this one up first (and honestly, I'd probably recommend that course of action). It is a much more intimate novel, focusing mainly on two characters who also appeared in the first book - Lovelace, once a ship's AI but now housed in an artificial body, known as Sidra, and engineer extraordinaire, Pepper.

This is a truly fascinating book, focusing both on Sidra's journey of adjustment from being a ship's AI to an independent entity, and giving us Pepper's at-times extremely harrowing backstory. Through both stories, the reader is taken on an exploration of what being an individual means, and how much we can choose to create who we are. The theme of found family, so prevalent in the first book, is also here.

This book is highly recommended, both to people who read and loved the first book, and those who may have bounced off it, as well as those new to Chambers' work. It's something really special, and I'm very happy that it's on the Hugo ballot this year. I'm very much looking forward to the next novel set in this universe.

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers is a companion novel to Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. It follows characters which appear in Long Way to a Small Angry Planet but covers events that happen both before and after the events in the earlier book. The two books can be read in any order, although the existence of one of the characters in A Closed and Common Orbit is a spoiler for one of the events in Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. Otherwise, there is very little overlap.

Lovelace was once merely a ship's artificial intelligence. When she wakes up in an new body, following a total system shut-down and reboot, she has no memory of what came before. As Lovelace learns to negotiate the universe and discover who she is, she makes friends with Pepper, an excitable engineer, who's determined to help her learn and grow.

Together, Pepper and Lovey will discover that no matter how vast space is, two people can fill it together.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet introduced readers to the incredible world of Rosemary Harper, a young woman with a restless soul and secrets to keep. When she joined the crew of the Wayfarer, an intergalactic ship, she got more than she bargained for - and learned to live with, and love, her rag-tag collection of crewmates.

The environment and ensemble cast in A Closed and Common Orbit are quite different to those in Long Way to a Small Angry Planet The book consists of alternating chapters from the points of view of two characters: an AI who has just been moved to a human-looking body, after having been a ship AI; and Pepper, the human woman helping the AI. The AI sections are set in the "present", having some temporal overlap with Long Way to a Small Angry Planet whereas Pepper's sections recount her rather horrific childhood. Sidra, the AI, has relatively mundane concerns regarding learning how to function as a person, and fitting in so as not to be discovered (an AI pretending to be human is illegal). Pepper's childhood and teen years, however, are much starker than might normally be expected and I found her half of the story more gripping and emotive.

It was not immediately apparent how the two stories tied together — aside from the obvious part where Pepper features in Sidra's story — but this became clear at the end (and a bit earlier, if you were paying attention). Even so, I was more invested in (young) Pepper for the entire book. The ending was wonderfully touching, and Sidra was involved in that, but it was mainly touching because of what we had learnt about Pepper's life. Which is not to say that Sidra's story was boring — it certainly had its exciting moments — but my interest in it was more intellectual than emotional.

If you enjoyed Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, then I expect you will also enjoy A Closed and Common Orbit. However, if you didn't like the plot structure of Long Way to a Small Angry Planet then, despite the dual storylines, A Closed and Common Orbit might not be for you. If you enjoy sociological SF about community and the meaning of personhood, then this is definitely the book for you. I am keen to see what else Chambers writes, whether or not it is set in the same universe as her first two books.

4.5 / 5 stars

First published: 2016, Hachette Australia
Series: Sort of. Wayfarers universe, second publication set in that world
Format read: eARC
Source: publisher via NetGalley