#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.