A Closed and Common Orbit (A Review)

I love learning. I love history. But there’s history in everything. Every building, everybody you talk to. It’s not limited to libraries and museums. I think people who spend their lives in school forget that sometimes.
 

A Closed and Common Orbit is the sequel to Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. I read it right on the heels of its predecessor (Wayfarers #1), and am grateful that I did. Had I not, I don’t know that the transformation in the narrative would have been as stark to me. Where Long Way told the story of a group of characters (a team, a family, a what-have-you), Closed and Common is essentially two stories – each of one person. This allows the narrative to blossom, changing the shape of the story to better suit its purpose. Much as Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead evolved the narrative that Ender’s Game began, so too does Closed and Common stand as an evolution of the story Long Way started.

Many of the things I praised Becky Chambers for in Long Way are not present in this book; here she doesn’t make space feel so wide open and dangerous and beautiful, but instead makes cities and planets feel small and special and homey. Similarly, she doesn’t spread her attention equally among a cast of characters as she so expertly did in her first book, but keeps us near to two women whose paired stories illuminate the universe held within Closed and Common. This isn’t to say that this sequel showcased none of the same qualities as the first. As in Long Way, Closed and Common features a diverse cast of alien characters and as before Chambers wastes little time in the clumsy or drawn-out introductions that so often plague science fiction stories. She makes them clear to us, at once thoroughly understandable and completely alien. And as in book #1, Chambers mixes lighthearted humor with dread and fear and heartbreak and all manner of loves, so that her book is as thrilling and entertaining and emotionally restorative as it is illuminating.

If I’m being dramatic (as I so often am about science fiction) this book is proof that the kind of science fiction that serves to examine what it is to be human is alive, is well, is thriving. It would not be exaggerating to say that in reading Chambers’ A Closed and Common Orbit I came to a better understanding of myself and the place I choose for myself in society. I literally stopped and took notes – not for this review but for myself, for later, for living.

In short, Becky Chambers writes with an earnest voice and tells stories full of complexity, transcending taste and style and allowing her characters, her stories, and her messages to speak to readers all over. If you have even a passing interest, this book is worth the read.