Best Novel Nominees: A Closed and Common Orbit

I love emotionally optimistic science fiction and fantasy.  Stories where the protagonists are not only “good” on a moral scale but also empathetic and kind – and who can demonstrate that kindness can be a strength.  Basically, the opposite of the recent “grimdark” trend (though I have been known to enjoy stories fitting that label as well).  My prototype for this was Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor, whose protagonist Maia was a breath of fresh air I didn’t know I needed.

Which is all to say that the first book in Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers series, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, was a joy to read in a similar way.  The ensemble of protagonists, making up the crew of the Wayfarer, has drawn comparisons to Firefly and Star Trek – the crew’s familial relationship, including not only love and cohabitation but also the occasional squabble, is the beating heart of the book.  The diversity of the crew (and the universe!) in species, gender identity, relationship structure, and biology brings a distinctly utopian feeling as well; most Humans¹Side note on capitalization: Like Mass Effect, occasionally mentioned as another precursor to the series, the Wayfarer books acknowledge the inconsistency of capitalizing the names of alien species but not our own, as so many other SF stories do.  But it remedies it in the opposite way: while Mass Effect lowercased “turian” and “krogan”, Wayfarers chooses to uppercase “Human” (and so I have done likewise in this post).  It’s a detail I noticed and appreciated in both works. are some shade of brown with dark hair because the diasporic Human society gave up on racial divisions long ago.  The members of the crew generally try to understand and accommodate each others’ biological, cultural, and personal differences, though they don’t always succeed, and under pressure the domestic peace aboard the Wayfarer is often strained.

So, on to A Closed and Common Orbit, which I read immediately following.  The sequel, to my brief and unjustified regret, does not continue with the adventures of the Wayfarer.  Rather, it tightens its focus onto two characters from the first book – Sidra, an AI recently transferred into an illegal “body kit” allowing her to emulate a Human rather than being confined to a server, and Pepper, a mechanic and technician who was a minor character in the first book.  The narrative alternates between their two stories.  Sidra’s story takes place following the events of the previous book, and portrays her attempts to adjust to her body, pass for Human (with a little help from her body kit), and integrate into both galactic culture and Pepper’s home.  Pepper’s own story starts a couple decades earlier, with her childhood as an enslaved clone sorting scrap, interrupted by her discovery that there exists a world beyond the sorting facility’s walls.  Despite my brief disappointment to be leaving the Wayfarer behind, I was soon deeply engaged by the characters’ struggle for acceptance and growth.

As the meaning of family and the crew’s creation of a family-by-choice was the core theme of  The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, the heart of A Closed and Common Orbit is the idea of personhood.  What makes someone a person, rather than a tool, or an animal?  What freedoms are inherent to a person, and what happens to the right of personhood – if it is, indeed, a right – when those freedoms are curtailed?  What are the responsibilities of a person to their society, and what does society owe an individual person in return?  Both of the main characters’ struggles in this book are about attaining the right of self-determination and the responsibilities, to oneself and to others, that come with it; those struggles themselves become part of the characters’ identities, and help them each realize and fulfill those responsibilities in the end.

Additionally, both characters have to deal with challenges within their own minds.  Sidra is used to the full scope of her sensory input being constrained to the inside of a ship and its crew, but in the body kit her external senses are narrowed to the typical Human sensorium.  Simultaneously the scope of her stimuli increases dramatically, with exposure to wide-open spaces and crowds far beyond the size of the crew she is dealing with, and on top of all that, the simple reality of having a body requires significant adjustment.  The result is a condition that in a Human would likely be considered a blend of agoraphobia, social anxiety, autism, and body dysmorphia; Sidra’s development of coping methods (and the turmoil that ensues when they don’t quite work well enough) will be familiar to many people who struggle with mental illness, particularly those who have undergone cognitive-behavioral therapy.

Pepper, on the other hand, is a survivor of years of abuse – primarily emotional, occasionally physical.  She escapes her abusers relatively early in the story, but escaping the long-term effects and psychological conditioning of the abuse is a much longer process.  I can’t speak to the accuracy of the author’s depiction of Pepper’s abuse and PTSD as well as I could to Sidra’s anxiety and coping, but from what I understand of the subject, Pepper’s ongoing recovery – spanning multiple decades, and still in progress when the book ends – is just as faithful and empathetic a treatment of the topic.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet might be my favorite book of the last couple years, and so it was difficult for A Closed and Common Orbit to measure up to.  But the emotional heart of the first book is still there – the love and care between the characters; the emotional verisimilitude of people living together, rubbing up against each others’ sore spots, arguing, and then working their issues out; and underneath it all the breadth and depth of a much vaster universe that I can’t wait to see more of.  All that together makes A Closed and Common Orbit one of my favorite books of 2016.