A Closed and Common Orbit

I don't knowwwww, man. This book is so well-liked with all the great reviews and stuff but it just didn't work for me. It wasn't terrible by any means and had a fairly interesting story, but I just... found it a little draggy almost.

We get a split narrative here, first with Lovelace's brand new iteration after the end of the first book, now also stuck in a “kit”, i.e. a synthetic body that looks and can behave like a human but isn't. Pepper brings her back to her home planet of Coriol, where Lovelace gains a new name (Sidra), meets Pepper's friend/partner, and eventually learns about life as a sentient AI. In the other narrative, we learn about Pepper's origins, from her beginning as possibly some kind of clone, her life in a factory (literally a factory in which she and other girls like her are made), and then eventually how she ended up as a mechanic.

Book 1 was amazing for me because it had a strong plot driving things forward while also giving us the readers time to know the different members of the crew, the ways different species behaved and interacted, and the unique stories for each member. Because there was an underlying point of the story, I appreciated everything else the book was showing me about species that were gender-fluid, or had much more complex family units (more than two parents, most of whom are not biological), etc. This book - didn't have that.

Instead, Book 2 spends a lot of time in both narratives meandering and taking its time. We don't really have any crisis or a “mission objective” for the narrative until maybe about 75% in. In a sense, it reminded me a lot of Chambers's other novella series, Monk and Robot, but it worked for that one because the point of that book was to be contemplative and to almost function like Plato's Dialogues in the way it was exploring concepts and asking thought-provoking questions. In this one, I didn't get the feeling that that was its objective. Instead, we get smatterings of action here and there, smatterings of questions here and there, but honestly nothing that really had a huge impact on me, or which made me stop and think, “That's such a good question.” which I usually do with most of Chambers's work.

I've heard that the rest of the series will take its time with other characters and so aren't narratively linked to each other, so will still give them a try!