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sophia_sol) wrote2019-01-22 07:44 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2019-01-22 07:44 pm
Record of a Spaceborn Few, by Becky Chambers
Set in the same world as Chambers' other two novels, but all three are stand-alones that you don't have to read the others to understand.
My emotional involvement in this instalment was a little slow to start. This book has approximately a zillion viewpoint characters it swaps between. (Okay, more like, uh, 6 or 7 or something like that I think?) And I am just SO BAD at names and at keeping characters straight so each chapter switch it was like "so who is this again???" Which kind of interrupts one's ability to be swallowed by a book.
Like the others in the series, this book is low on plot. It's basically about showing you a snapshot of a culture experiencing a time of transition, introducing you to the various ways different sorts of people experience what's going on, allowing you to see and understand that culture through many eyes.
The cultural context in question: the group of humans who continue to live on the generation ships which humanity used to get to this part of space, even though there are now plenty of well-settled habitable planets available to live on. Now that these humans have access to a) alien technology, b) alien money, and c) planets, how does that change the self-sufficient and communal life of the Exodans aboard their ships? And how much is it desirable to change?
Interesting questions, and interestingly addressed. Having the many viewpoints definitely aided with what this book was trying to do. But it also meant that as a reading experience it didn't work for me as well as Chambers' previous books. Which is too bad. But "not quite as good as the others in this series" is not at all the same thing as "not very good" - this is a good book, and certainly worth reading!
I did find that things picked up for me after Sawyer died. I'm not sure if that's because that just happened to be the point in the book where I was far enough along to have gotten the hang of keeping track of everybody, or because Sawyer's death as a fulcrum for events meant that the stuff the book did after that point was of more interest to me than the stuff that came before. But either way, although at the moment Sawyer died I was honestly pretty annoyed that that's what the book was going to do with his character arc, from that point on I found the rest of the book totally captivating.
My emotional involvement in this instalment was a little slow to start. This book has approximately a zillion viewpoint characters it swaps between. (Okay, more like, uh, 6 or 7 or something like that I think?) And I am just SO BAD at names and at keeping characters straight so each chapter switch it was like "so who is this again???" Which kind of interrupts one's ability to be swallowed by a book.
Like the others in the series, this book is low on plot. It's basically about showing you a snapshot of a culture experiencing a time of transition, introducing you to the various ways different sorts of people experience what's going on, allowing you to see and understand that culture through many eyes.
The cultural context in question: the group of humans who continue to live on the generation ships which humanity used to get to this part of space, even though there are now plenty of well-settled habitable planets available to live on. Now that these humans have access to a) alien technology, b) alien money, and c) planets, how does that change the self-sufficient and communal life of the Exodans aboard their ships? And how much is it desirable to change?
Interesting questions, and interestingly addressed. Having the many viewpoints definitely aided with what this book was trying to do. But it also meant that as a reading experience it didn't work for me as well as Chambers' previous books. Which is too bad. But "not quite as good as the others in this series" is not at all the same thing as "not very good" - this is a good book, and certainly worth reading!
I did find that things picked up for me after Sawyer died. I'm not sure if that's because that just happened to be the point in the book where I was far enough along to have gotten the hang of keeping track of everybody, or because Sawyer's death as a fulcrum for events meant that the stuff the book did after that point was of more interest to me than the stuff that came before. But either way, although at the moment Sawyer died I was honestly pretty annoyed that that's what the book was going to do with his character arc, from that point on I found the rest of the book totally captivating.
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