Booklog 27/2023: Becky Chambers: A Closed and Common Orbit

[jacey]

Audiobook. This is a standalone which follows on from A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. Lovelace, the ship-board AI in the first book has, due to circumstances, been lodged in a humanoid artificial body (which she calls the Kit) and is staying, planet-bound, with an engineer called Pepper, trying to fit in (on account of if the authorities discover what she is, she’ll be terminated. Much of this is Lovelace, now called Sidra, trying to make sense of her new world and the people (some human, some alien) in it. There’s a second story, set in the past about a girl called Jane 24 who (at the beginning) is a slave in a scrap reclamation factory with a load of other Janes, perhaps bred for the life. When Jane 24 escapes she finds herself in a hostile world of scrap-heaps, threatened by feral dogs, and only survives because she stumbles across a derelict abandoned shuttle which still has a functional AI, Owl. Owl educates and raises Jane 24 for years, all the time in the hope that Jane can find the right components in the scrap-dump to make the shuttle functional again. Of the two stories I much prefer that of Jane 24 to Sidra

Comments

[watervole]

I greatly preferred Jane 24's story as well, though I did like the idea of Sidra needing cameras everywhere.

Jane's search for Owl was so touching.

[jacey]

Agreed. I got frustrated with Sidra's story.

[jazzlet]

I felt the same as both of you.