CBR18 Book 7: "The Galaxy, and the Ground Within" by Becky Chambers

Page count: 325 pages

Rating: 5 stars

Monthly Keyword Challenge 26: Ground

Nowhere Book Bingo 26: A book that came out more than 4 years ago

Defeating the Goblin TBR 26: The Gizmo Book (A Sci-fi or Dystopian book)

Reading Rainbow - Indigo cover

The planet of Gora doesn't have much to recommend itself to anyone, except as a stopover for travellers to other, more interesting parts of space. Travellers can rest, refuel, eat, restock their supplies and update any permits that might be required. It's like an interstellar truck stop between big wormholes. 

The Five-Hop One-Stop is run by Ouloo, a Laru (from the description of what the Laru looked like, I imagined a Golden Retriever with longer limbs and a long, bendable neck), and her child, Tupo. Ouloo clearly takes immense pride in catering to her guests, and has made an effort to make the Five-Hop One-Stop as comfortable for as many species who travel the galaxy as possible. She's courteous, but also curious about the various lives of the visitors who come and go. 

While Ouloo is hosting three very different guests, all there mainly to refuel and restock for a brief while, there is some sort of catastrophic event that leads a lot of the satellites around the planet to crash down, meaning all travel in and out of the planet is halted, and all communications are shut down. So for five days, Ouloo, Tupo and the three guests are stranded together at the Five-Hop One-Stop. There is Speaker, an Akarak, separated from her sickly twin sister for the first time ever. The Akarak can't breathe oxygen, so they wear space suits whenever they leave their ship. Based on the description of her species, I pictured the Akarak basically like big sloths. The second traveller, who is very distressed by not being able to travel further, is Roveg, a Quelin (seemed a bit like an armoured centipede), who has a very important appointment he needs to get to, and the delays on Gora could mean he misses his chance. The final guest is Pei, an Aeluon (they communicate in colours), who readers who have read the first book in the Wayfarers series will recognise as Captain Ashby's romantic partner. 

This book has very little plot to speak of, although there are some dramatic things that happen over the course of the five days. What the reader gets is five character studies, but that's not nothing, because Becky Chambers writes so beautifully that even five people stuck in the same place and trying their best to get along (and in the case of Speaker and Roveg, not panic about the delays) is fascinating to read, and I wouldn't have minded another hundred pages or so, especially since this is the final book in the series. While this is the fourth and final book, all the books can be read independently of each other, and work perfectly well as stand-alones.

It's difficult to pinpoint exactly what made me love this book so much. The only character who has appeared in any of Chambers' books before is Pei, and there she was a secondary character, whose point of view we were never able to share her point of view, like we do here. Yet Chambers makes you care for all of them, and become invested in their lives and futures. As is pretty much always the case, this book made me smile, and it made me cry, and I didn't really want it to end. 

Chambers doesn't appear to have published anything since the Monk & Robot novellas, which came out in 2021 and 2022. I do hope she hasn't stopped writing entirely, but whatever she is doing, I hope she is enjoying it. 

Judging a book by its cover: The UK covers for these books, with the vast views of starlit skies, are all so beautiful, and the US covers for these are so very clunky and (to me) ugly. The font, the way the images are positioned, I do not care for them. Which is why I've made sure I buy the UK editions when I have the chance. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

CBR15 Books 43-44: "A Psalm for the Wild-Built" and "A Prayer for the Crown-Shy" by Becky Chambers

Total page count: 320 pages

Rating, both stories: 4.5 stars

CBR15 Bingo: On the Road

On a moon (that seems quite like Earth in many respects) called Panga, people live peacefully together in harmonious small communities. There are remnants of a previous industrial age, and it's suggested that there was a near apocalypse way back when, but humanity improved and started thinking about what was better for their environment, possibly helped by the exodus of their robots. At some point, in the distant past, many generations ago, the robots that had been working in the factories and enabled humans to industrialise most everything, gained sentience and asked the humans for their freedom. This seems to have been managed without any major conflict - no Terminator-style rise of the machines on Panga. When offered an equal place in society as the humans themselves had, the robots instead chose to leave society entirely and go off into the untouched wilderness to observe it in all its glory.

Hence no one has seen any robots for a very, very long time, until one of our protagonists, Sibling Dex (they/them), a restless monk, encounters the other of our protagonists, the robot Mosscap, during his possibly inadvisable trek through the wilderness. Sibling Dex, initially a monk working in a monastic society in the city started yearning for the sound of crickets, something they certainly would never experience living and working where they were. So they retrained and became a tea monk, an individual who travels around to all the far-flung human settlements in a little wagon supplied with teas and tisanes and on their stops along the way offer up tea and a little oasis of calm to anyone who feels like joining them. Sibling Dex works diligently to make their various blends and brews and after some false starts, becomes a sympathetic and caring listener to those who wish to unburden themselves while enjoying a cup of tea in their presence. 

After some time of travelling to the various small communities, Sibling Dex is forced to acknowledge that not even becoming a tea monk has managed to soothe the unease inside them, and they still haven't been able to find any crickets to listen to. So they somewhat rashly decide to leave settled human society and venture into the wilderness in search of a rumoured ruined monastery, where there may still be crickets. Sibling Dex is rather taken aback at encountering Mosscap (full name Splendid Speckled Mosscap - the robots take their name from the first thing they see when they first wake up). Mosscap, on the other hand, is delighted to meet Sibling Dex. Being wild-built, a robot created by some of the descendants of the first robots to achieve sentience, Mosscap has proposed to venture into the human world to find out how humanity is now doing and discover what they need. Sibling Dex tries to explain that this is a very large task, which might even be impossible, considering how many different humans there are and how many dreams and wishes exist among them. 

After some back and forth, Mosscap decides to accompany Sibling Dex through the wilderness in search of crickets, while Sibling Dex agrees to be the robot's guide to humanity. On their continuing journey, they have many lovely and meaningful conversations and begin to become unlikely friends.

In A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, Sibling Dex and Mosscap's friendship and mutual understanding deepen, as Sibling Dex takes Mosscap around to villages and cities on Panga, so Mosscap can try to answer their question of what humans want. Among the places they visit is Sibling Dex's own home, and large and boisterous family. 

These lovely novellas, which came to be during the deeply depressing years of the Covid pandemic are relatively short (I wish I'd gotten to spend more time with Sibling Dex and Mosscap) and very gentle, philosophical reads. They are apparently classified as solarpunk - an optimistic vision of a more sustainable future, where there are close connections between nature and community. This certainly seems to fit the bill here. Everything seems carefully crafted, sustainable, and solar-powered, and people live with an awareness of and respect for nature, making sure not to make too serious a footprint while building their settlements. Considering the world we currently live in, it's a wonderful fantasy.

Chambers is a talented writer, whose characterisation and world-building in the previous novels I've read, are all excellent. These novellas are no different and like the people who sit by Sibling Dex's tea wagon for a spell, unburdening themselves about various troubles and receiving kind-hearted advice in return, these books felt like a balm for my soul, containing a lot of philosophy and musings on what makes us happy, what makes for a satisfying life and so forth, but also just cozy, low-peril plots that nevertheless entertained. Chambers has been nominated for a lot of awards for these stories and won the Hugo Award for Best Novella 2022 for A Psalm for the Wild-Built and the Locus Award for Best Novella 2022 for A Prayer for the Crown-Shy. 

I don't know if there are more novellas planned about Sibling Dex and Mosscap, since these seem to have come out in 2021 and 2022, and there has been nothing since. Checking her blog, it seems as if she's on hiatus from writing for an undisclosed period of time because of bereavement, so it may be a while before we see anything at all from her, not just about Monk and Robot. 

Judging the books by their covers: I don't really have much to say, except that these covers are so very lovely and give tiny hints of what the books contain. I especially like the windy roads on the cover of A Psalm for the Wild-Built and the lovely combination of colours on A Prayer for the Crown-Shy. There's something about the images that just feels soothing. They make me feel calmer and happier just looking at them. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

#CBR11 Book 70: "Record of a Spaceborn Few" by Becky Chambers

Page count: 400 pages
Rating: 4 stars

From Goodreads:
From the ground, we stand. From our ship, we live. By the stars, we hope

Centuries after the last humans left Earth, the Exodus Fleet is a living relic, a place many are from but few outsiders have seen. Humanity has finally been accepted into the galactic community, but while this has opened doors for many, those who have not yet left for alien cities fear that their carefully cultivated way of life is under threat.

Tessa chose to stay home when her brother Ashby left for the stars, but has to question that decision when her position in the Fleet is threatened.

Kip, a reluctant young apprentice, itches for change but doesn't know where to find it.

Sawyer, a lost and lonely newcomer, is just looking for a place to belong.

When a disaster rocks this already fragile community, those Exodans who still call the Fleet their home can no longer avoid the inescapable question:

What is the purpose of a ship that has reached its destination?

Having now read all three of Becky Chambers' Wayfarers novels, I think I can confidently say that the first one, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is still my favourite one. This third novel is the one it took me the longest to really get into, and I kept putting it down and getting distracted by other things because it's a lot slower than her other two books. For a while, I wasn't really "feeling" it, and was wondering if I was just in the wrong head space for the story. Concerning itself with the different points of view of a number of individuals living on an aging space station, populated by Exodans (the descendants of the humans who first left Earth to live on ships among the stars), and also the observations of an alien scientist there to study their way of life. With a lot of the characters, I didn't really see why I should care about them, and it took me quite a while to see how all the point of view characters' stories fit together.

Once the book entered its final act, so to speak, and it all became clear to me, this book had me in tears and I suddenly understood exactly why Chambers had chosen to tell the story the way she had. The emotional payoff simply would not have been as powerful if I hadn't stuck with the story and gotten the various back stories, eventually woven together to a beautiful conclusion. To anyone reading this review, who may be doubting whether they should keep going with the book, even through the slow start - stick with it, it's very worth it in the end.

Judging a book by its cover: This may be the first of these books where, while I think the cover is pretty, I don't necessarily think it really fits with the book. The silhouette looks like a person sitting on the ground looking up at the stars, someone clearly planet-bound. Yet all of the people in this book are on space stations, born and raised, it's an important part of the story. I think another image might have suited the book better.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR11 Book 55: "A Closed and Common Orbit" by Becky Chambers

Page count: 512 pages
Rating: 4 stars

#CBR11 Bingo: Cannonballer Says (recommended by Carriejay, faintingviolet, emmalita, dAvid, tillie, badkittyuno and Narfna, among others)

Official book description:
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.

Last year, for Cannonball Bingo, I chose one of the books that had been on my TBR for several years, Becky Chambers' The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. When trying to decide on my book for the "Cannonballer Says" square for this year's Bingo, it seemed fitting to read the second book in the Wayfarer series. This book isn't so much a sequel, as it is a companion novel set in the same universe, sort of involving one of the characters we met in that book. 

Lovelace, who was the near-sentient A.I (artificial intelligence) on board the Wayfarer, finds herself housed no longer on board a space ship, but in an artificial body, made to look and sound completely human. Due to a series of unfortunate events, leading to a complete systems reboot, Lovelace no longer remembers being the consciousness who wanted a physical body, and instead finds herself confused and unmoored, helped away from the spaceship that was once her home by Pepper, an engineer and mechanic who promises to help her.

Lovelace renames herself Sidra and is brought to the home that Pepper shares with Blue, her artist partner (I think he's her boyfriend, but they may just be platonic life mates - the story really doesn't focus on that aspect of their relationship). A.I.s are not considered sentient individuals with rights and feelings, and it's highly illegal to do what the techs aboard the Wayfarer did, in trying to put Lovelace in a body. So if anyone finds out the truth about Sidra, Pepper and Blue could face serious trouble, and Sidra would probably just find herself shut down permanently.

Sidra struggles with the limitations of her new body and in trying to figure out who she is, and what she wants from her life. She gradually gets more outgoing and adventurous, makes at least one friend who isn't Pepper or Blue and starts to come to terms with her new "humanity".

 In alternating chapters to Sidra's story, we follow Pepper's life  in flashback from she was a young clone, enslaved on a backwater planet, who escapes the life of servitude and ignorance she was born into, befriending and in effect being raised by an A.I, and the struggle she has to educate herself, find enough scrap material on the industrial waste planet she finds herself on, fix up the space shuttle containing her A.I. parent to a degree where they can actually leave and make a better life for themselves somewhere else in the universe. 

I'm not entirely sure what I was expecting from this book, but it was very different indeed from The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. This book was a lot more introspective, and a lot of the plot is concerned with forging new identities and struggling to make a place for oneself in the world, rather than with an exciting space journey. The first third or so of the book felt a bit slow, and I wasn't all that interested in the early chapters about tiny Pepper (who was one of many Janes back then), but in the second half of the book, I was hooked enough that I didn't want to stop reading, be it the chapters about Sidra or Jane/Pepper. 

I can see why Becky Chambers' books are so very popular. I'm glad I still have one more in her Wayfarers series to read before I'm caught up with her back catalogue.

Judging a book by its cover: The books in this series all come with two different cover versions. One has a big, clunky, ugly font that takes up much of the front page of the book and completely ruins the effect (although really does get across what the title of the books are, I guess). The other covers are these stunning skyscapes with a couple of individuals in silhouette and the most amazing star and light shows dominating the images. My e-book versions all have the covers I prefer, and I genuinely can't understand why there is such a massive difference in tone and design. Who would want the big, ugly font covers when they could have such beauty and simple elegance?

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

#CBR10 Book 95: "The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet" by Becky Chambers

Page count: 519 pages
Rating: 4 stars

#CBR10Bingo: Cannonballer Recommends (this was a CBR Book Exchange gift from Yesknopemaybe (my paperback copy), it has also been favourably reviewed by MathildeHoeg, ingres77, dAvid, badkittyuno, belphebe, emmalita, narfna and faintingviolet, among others)

Rosemary Harper is trying to escape her old life and doesn't want anyone tracking her down. She pays a lot of money to get a new identity and gets a job on a run-down and patched up spaceship, where no one from her old life would ever think to look for her. Aboard the Wayfarer, with its eclectic, but mostly affectionate crew, she finds a sense of community and a found family she never knew she was missing.

What starts out as mostly routine space travel becomes a lot more dramatic when the crew get an amazing, yet dangerous, job opportunity. Hired to make a wormhole tunnel to a distant planet, currently involved in a vicious civil war, could make the crew a huge amount of money. They have to survive to spend their earnings, though.

Science fiction is a genre I really would like to enjoy, but which I keep struggling with. Every so often, a book or a series comes along that I genuinely enjoy, but so much of the time, the genre just leaves me cold, or maybe bored out of my mind. I also much prefer sci-fi on screen, on TV or film. I tried reading Leviathan Wakes, the first book in The Expanse series, and it just didn't do anything for me. The TV series, on the other hand, I'm hugely enjoying (to the point where I am now furious, because the husband and I are halfway through season 2, and they suddenly yanked it from Norwegian Netflix - how am I going to get the rest of it now?) and it brings the characters and story alive for me in a way the book just didn't.

When I first heard about this book, there was only the one book in the series. There are now three, and in the time since I got the first book on sale, a whole bunch of people whose opinions I trust and respect have reviewed it in glowing terms. Frankly, a book that seems to appeal to so many different people just has to be good, right? So it was an obvious choice for my "Cannonballer Recommends" square (especially since I've been trying to cull my ever expanding TBR list a bit while planning the reads). Nevertheless, I was worried that I was going to be a lone voice who didn't see what all the fuss was about.

Happily, this book worked for me and I enjoyed it a lot. I know I own the second book in the series as well, and am now looking forward to getting to read that in the near future. I suspect that the kind of sci-fi that works for me, is the strongly character driven stuff. Yes, this book features a dangerous tunnelling mission into unknown space and there are potentially hostile aliens who could harm our crew, but that is all secondary to the relationships between the actual crew members and the various interpersonal events that take place. While the ship and the various alien planets are obviously described, not that much time is spent on the technical aspects of things and boring tech stuff. This book cares much more about the various people aboard the Wayfarer, who we get to know through the eyes of Rosemary, and the people and androids they interact with on various planets and ships along the way.

There are absolutely dramatic events that take place over the course of this book, but I cared more about how they impacted on the characters I came to know and enjoy, than for the events themselves. Because I really enjoyed the crew, even the more disagreeable members, I could happily just keep reading about them bimbling about in space. I was sad to discover that the next books, while set in the same universe and sort of loosely connected with this book, don't actually focus any more on the crew of the Wayfarer. Still, Becky Chambers writes sci-fi that I enjoy, so I will give the other books a chance as well. It's not often that I find something I'm excited to read more of in this genre (Narfna's going to be so excited!), so I need to stick with the things that actually work for me.

Thank you, Yesknopemaybe, for my book (you had no idea of knowing I already owned an e-book copy of it). Having now read and enjoyed it, I'm delighted to have a physical copy I can lend to my non e-book reading friends.

Judging a book by its cover: I have two copies of this book, with two different covers. The e-book that I got in an e-book sale back in 2016 has this lovely cover design, with the soaring sky above a tiny, lone person in silhouette. I love this cover. My paperback has the newer cover, which feels like it's pretty much all clunky font and no grace or elegance. I'm assuming the publishers chose the redesign for a good reason, but as far as I can tell, some versions of the sequels also have the pretty, sky-filled cover designs still, so clearly some markets prefer these to the "giant font" ones.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.