Jane’s story is perhaps a bit more eventful, her growing awareness and her relationship with an AI called Owl were more fleshed out, however, her narrative uses a stylistic choice that could be a bit annoying: the writing reflects Jane’s vocabulary which isn’t very vast.

The dual timeline creates a parallel between Sidra and Jane (aka Piper). The novel also focuses on Piper’s unusual past. Sidra makes friends with Tak, a gender-shifting Aeluon, who is also a tattoo artist. She attempts to help Sidra adjust to her new form but she doesn’t really appear that much in Sidra’s narrative. Piper, a friendly engineer, is one of the few people who know that Sidra is not human. Thanks to a reboot Sidra is no longer Lovelace, and struggles to understand why her previous installation would ever want to inhabit a body that is so constrictive.

There were time where I felt really enchanted by her story….however, I think that The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet was a much more engaging novel, one that offered a more defined storyline and a more complex cast of characters.Ī Closed and Common Orbit follows an Sidra – formerly known as Lovelace the AI of the Wayfarer – who has to adjust to a new human looking “body”. I tried reading it more than a year ago but ended up returning the book to the library so I thought that the audiobook version would be more easy to get into.Ĭhambers has created a very charming universe. Review of A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

A closed and common orbit review