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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
This is an ensemble novel, featuring the multi-species crew of a ship that punches wormholes in space and shores them up to create transport links. Rosemary, fresh from Mars and travelling under an assumed name, takes a job on the Wayfarer as a clerk.
Ashby Santoso is the captain, an Exodan human and a pacifist who is having a long-distance affair with an Aeluon woman, Pei. Corbin, a Solan human, is the algaeist, good at his job but a complete asshole. Kizzy and Jenks are engineers. Both are human, but Jenks is very small in stature. Sissix is the pilot, a lizard-like Aandrisk with green scales from her head to the tip of her tail. Doctor Chef, whose alien name is unpronounceable is both of those things, doctor and chef. He's a Grum with six limbs that work as either hands or feet. The navigator, Ohan, is a reclusive Sianat Pair, two personalities on one (blue furry) body, courtesy of a virus. The final crewmember is Lovelace, or Lovey, their AI who has formed a more-than-special relationship with Jenks.
The first quarter of the book is Rosemary settling in, the reader being introduced to the players, and the Wayfarer crew making a successful tunnelling jump. This sets everything to 'normal' in this universe. Then they are offered a very lucrative contract to punch a tunnel through from Toremi space back to the core. It's a job that has to be done in that particular direction, so firstly they Wayfarer has to get to Toremi space, a journey that will take a year, hence the book's title. And, of course the job is not straightforward.
Ms Chambers worldbuilding is superb. Her diverse aliens and humans are well realised, as are all the places they visit along the way, and the people they meet (many of them old friends). The plot is fairly slight, but entertaining enough when the book is taken as a whole. I enjoyed this.
