Review: A Closed and Common Orbit

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This story is just wonderful. The dialogue and the internal monologues contained loads of relatable content as we journeyed with both an AI and a recently freed slave gaining their independence. After the next quote, I'm going to SPOIL the end of book #1 and the first few chapters of this story, you have been warned ⚠️ turn back now if you want to avoid those.

"Life is terrifying. None of us have a rule book. None of us know what we’re doing here. So, the easiest way to stare reality in the face and not utterly lose your shit is to believe that you have control over it."

At the end of book one Lovey experiences a system reboot to the default operating settings; her personality is lost along with her memories and the biggest casualty is her relationship with Jenks. Since one of the two threads in this book will follow what happens to Lovey after that change, you might expect, like I did, that this story would be about trying to bring back what she had lost. I had expected this story to be aimed at Lovey and Jenks rekindling that flame, but that doesn't happen at all. At all.

Instead Lovey sets off with Pepper in the body kit that Jenks had hoped would enable him and her to have a more physical relationship. The newly awakened AI forges a new life for herself from scratch, even choosing the new name Sidra. Having been designed to reside in a ship, with constant connection to information databases and monitoring equipment the experience is simultaneously liberating and unsettling for Sidra.

I liked the way that Sidra referred to her physical actions as the kit's actions. The kit is her body and where we would naturally say "I raised my arm," Sidra would instead say "I raised the kit's arm" or she might even say "the kit raised its arm" after more automatic or instinctive reactions. It showed a constant distinction between her mind and body, which is something I enjoyed quite a lot.

Now, as I mentioned, the book follows two parallel journeys about gaining independence. Very early in the book, when Sidra asks Pepper why she is offering to help her, Pepper reveals that she was herself raised by an AI and that the opportunity feels like a chance to return that kindness.

When we flash back to twenty years prior, we follow the story of a ten year old girl who is working under brutally strict forced labour at a scrap yard planet. It seemed pretty obvious to me that this girl was Pepper, so that's not the early spoiler I warned of. What wasn't quite so obvious was where the AI who raised her would appear. You see, the girls were overseen by "Mothers" which were faceless robots with a particularly mean streak. The spoiler is that we finally meet the AI who raised Pepper after she accidentally escapes from the facility.

Pepper's backstory on the scrap yard planet lasts for years while she learns how to fend for herself and how to function without orders.

Both of these threads are wonderful emotional journeys with such authentic highs and lows and the depth and maturity of Chambers' writing stands out in this book.

I had failed to mention in my review of book one that there were some chunks of exposition which I thought could have been handled much better. I generally don't mind straight up exposition, but found some of the delivery in that previous book extremely dry, (I'm thinking of one massive data dump of a chapter in particular.) However, I found it to be significantly improved in this book. There was still a fair amount of it, but it was more creatively handled, I thought.

The other thing that I liked much more about this book was that there was a much smaller cast to follow, even split over the two narratives it felt more manageable to me.

Well, as you'd like to expect, the two threads ultimately join together and provide a very exciting mission for the conclusion of this story. I would say this floated at 4-stars for the first three-quarters of the book but the ending easily bumped it up to five for me.

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