Reading: A Closed and Common Orbit
Nov. 2nd, 2018 08:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartI had to have two goes at Becky Chambers' first novel, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, but ended up quite enjoying it without being wowed by it; I thought it was a pleasantly upbeat space opera which felt very much like a fairly lightweight SF TV series in book form. I did think though, that in some ways it felt like the SF equivalent of the kind of historical novel where the characters all feel like modern people dressed up in historical costumes, with all the issues it explored seeming to be very directly equivalent to contemporary social issues (then again, that is a fairly common issue with the kind of TV series it reminded me of).
Given this ambivalence, I didn't rush to buy the follow-up, A Closed and Common Orbit, but ended up ordering a copy last year when I was stocking up on comforting and fluffy reads on the grounds that while it might not be brilliant, I might want a fluffy SF comfort read sometime. However, I found that I liked this one a lot less than the first book. The feeling that I was reading about 21st century people and problems dressed up in SF clothes, rather than SF which was offering a new perspective on contemporary problem, was even stronger this time round as the novel ticked off a list of issues including neurodivergence, genderfluidity and child labour. I also felt that neither of the two central characters really had much more depth than the much larger cast of characters of the first novel; there seemed to be a lot of description of their day-to-day lives in the place of character development. I also wasn't very keen on the novel's resolution; I felt that Chambers actually sets up some major structural societal problems in the future she depicts, and then instead of tackling them presents an individual happy ending as being all that's needed, and I am currently quite over the idea that individual actions are the answer to society-level problems.
Ultimately, although it's not terrible, for everything this book does, I can think of other books which do the same thing, but better. If I wanted to read about a ship's AI adapting to life in a human body, I could read Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy. If I wanted to read about concepts of personhood as applied to AIs, I could read Martha Wells' Murderbot novellas. And if I wanted SF fluff, Bujold would probably have been a better bet.
Given this ambivalence, I didn't rush to buy the follow-up, A Closed and Common Orbit, but ended up ordering a copy last year when I was stocking up on comforting and fluffy reads on the grounds that while it might not be brilliant, I might want a fluffy SF comfort read sometime. However, I found that I liked this one a lot less than the first book. The feeling that I was reading about 21st century people and problems dressed up in SF clothes, rather than SF which was offering a new perspective on contemporary problem, was even stronger this time round as the novel ticked off a list of issues including neurodivergence, genderfluidity and child labour. I also felt that neither of the two central characters really had much more depth than the much larger cast of characters of the first novel; there seemed to be a lot of description of their day-to-day lives in the place of character development. I also wasn't very keen on the novel's resolution; I felt that Chambers actually sets up some major structural societal problems in the future she depicts, and then instead of tackling them presents an individual happy ending as being all that's needed, and I am currently quite over the idea that individual actions are the answer to society-level problems.
Ultimately, although it's not terrible, for everything this book does, I can think of other books which do the same thing, but better. If I wanted to read about a ship's AI adapting to life in a human body, I could read Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy. If I wanted to read about concepts of personhood as applied to AIs, I could read Martha Wells' Murderbot novellas. And if I wanted SF fluff, Bujold would probably have been a better bet.
