My Experience with A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

I’m not crying. You’re crying!

A departure from the firefly-like space opera adventure, A Closed and Common Orbit is the second installment of the Wayfarers series. Becky Chambers brought her A-game with A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, but when I learned that she’d subtracted an important element of fun for me, I was skeptical about its sequel.

Sometimes less is more.

A Closed and Common Orbit leaves the Wayfarer and most of its crew behind to focus on Pepper and Lovey. After the unfortunate events of the first installment, Lovey must rebuild a new life as a sentient AI. Lovey renames herself Sidra, and she moves in with Pepper on a colony where she plans to live her life, careful to avoid those who might end her illegal presence.

Like its predecessor, A Closed and Common Orbit is character heavy and plot light. Yes, “things happen” and there is a “plot,” but the characters and how they interact with each other in their fantastic world are center stage without feeling that anything is missing, and I don’t think I’ve read a sci-fi author who does this better than Chambers.

And because of this, the story does what I think sci-fi is uniquely positioned to do better than most genres: create catharsis through thematic resonance. The fantasy genre (which, in my mind, sci-fi is a subset of) places the reader in a new setting or changes the rules of reality just enough to remove the reader from their daily lives, and in this state, an author may share ideas that the same reader might reject under different circumstances.

ACACO orbits the themes of identity and purpose. By removing the purposes given to Jane and Sidra, both characters are forced to rebuild their identities in the vacuum circumstance has created. At the same time, it begs questions of how purpose relates to personhood and, to some extent, when should personhood be ascribed to an entity.

I’m a softy. I’ll admit it. I cried at the story’s climax. (Also, I cry every time I watch Homeward Bound and that moment happens when Shadow doesn’t appear. It gets me EVERY TIME.) So, if you’re like me, be ready for the waterworks near the story’s end.

If you like character-driven sci-fi with touches of Firefly adventure, I can’t recommend the Wayfarer’s series enough. And the second installment has further endeared me to the author’s work. Give this one a try if you’ve read the first novel.