A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is both a follow-on to the previous one that picks up right where it left off and can be enjoyed as a standalone book. That’s quite a magic trick that Becky Chambers plays there, but it works very well. Essentially, the end of the first book necessitates the characters in this book leaving all the other characters alone and not really interacting with them. It’s also a very different kind of story. While The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is basically Firefly, with our crew going from planet to planet having vaguely linked adventures, this book all takes place in one place.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If, like me, Firefly’s untimely demise has left a hole in your SFF heart ever since you discovered it (it was DVDs for me back when Netflix was about DVDs), then this book is probably perfect for you. The big difference is that the crew of the Wayfarer is not escaping the law, they’re more like contractors for hire. In this case they’ll help create a wormhole for you so that you can get from point a to point b in hours instead of years or millenia. The captain wants to go for big government contracts so he hires Rosemary, our new-to-space character so that the reader has someone that’s learning along with them.

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Whenever I heard about this series, there are two things I heard about it:

1. “Studio Ghibli really screwed up their adapdation”
2. “Harry Potter is a huge ripoff of this book and I don’t believe that JK Rowling had never heard of it when she wrote Harry Potter.”

I can’t speak to the first one. But the second one is WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY overblown. At least, based off of this first book in the series they are almost nothing alike. I saw MUCH, MUCH greater similarities between Battle Royale and The Hunger Games. For starters, the first Harry Potter book is a children’s book (or at most a Middle Grade book) written in a very British kid’s book sort of plot. And as a whole it’s more of a children’s boarding school genre than fantasy or magic for large portions of various books (except the last one or two). By contrast, UKLG was tasked to write what we would now call a YA book. There is no focus on the school except as a setting for our young protagonist to act like a young man and be pressured by his rival into doing something stupid. We then spend the rest of the book with Ged (our protagonist) as a young man - they may have said his age at one point, but basically 17-19 years old or thereabouts. It has nothing in common with HP other than the fact that the main character attends a wizarding school.

Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book was a bit of a tough read as a sequel. In many ways it is completely unlike the first book. The first book is full of exploration and action. Gideon is our way into this world and boy are they a fun lens into the world. This time we find ourselves following Harrow. Harrow isn’t narrating. In fact, if you listen to the audiobook, rather than read the book, the narrator is a dead giveaway thanks to the audiobook narrator’s voice. But we’re following Harrow around. There are many ways in which this could have been interesting given the analytical mind Harrow seems to have in the first book. But, for reasons that it takes 75% of the book to unwind, Harrow’s mind is a bit unwell. (this NPR article articulates what I am trying to get across here https://www.npr.org/2020/08/06/899472… )

Good Nintentions: A 30th Anniversary Tribute to the Nintendo Entertainment System by Jeremy Parish

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This repackaged magazine special was quite the stroll down memory lane. This is the system where I became a gamer. But it’s also the system where I was a very little kid and when games cost something like $100 in 2021-money. So I had very few of these games and rented some of the others. The history behind the Nintendo was fairly well-known to me, having read a few video histories, but the histories behind games and their ports was new to me. The same way that early 80s and 90s anime got strangely butchered in its journey to the US (lookup how what we know as Robotech was put together), some of these games were full of very strange edits. I also knew about Nintendo’s puritanical stretch and how it affected the translation of later SNES RPGs like Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger, but the way it affected some of the NES-era games ventured into the bizarre.

From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back by Elizabeth Schaefer

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Some of these stories were great! Things felt a bit bogged down at Hoth, though. Too many stories around the Taun-Taun scenes. Overall recommended if you’re a Star Wars fan. Here’s my story-by-story review:

Eyes of the Empire (Kiersten White) - This story is about a small crew of imperial employees who have to review the footage from those drones that show up at the beginning of Empire Strikes Back. The story is short and cute, but all I could think about was the fact that a space-faring empire would not have humans reviewing all the images from these drones. They would have some machine learning algorithms trained to look for humans, vehicles, and non-visible spectrum for signs of life. Then a human would review those to eliminate false positives.

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I definitely can see what all the hype was about. This was a book that always left me guessing at what was coming next. Perhaps my usual trope detection failed me, but it seems to at Tamsyn Muir was able to keep things constantly fresh with plot twists that I mostly didn’t see coming. Even the one that they kept telegraphing (relating to one of the necromancers) turned out to be different than what I was expecting. We’re almost left with more questions than answers, but yet I felt like they did a perfect job creating a story filled with satisfying character arcs.

Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is my second time reading the book. Reduced rating from 4 stars to 3 stars

We’re back to The Watch and this is the Watch I remember - not just a detective/police procedural, but also a play on office politics/political correctness. This comes from the non-humans now being allowed on the force and female dwarves wanting to take advantage of living in the city to express their femininity. (Until now Pratchett always made a joke that it was hard for dwarves to figure out if the person they wanted to date was the opposite sex)

Cyborg Legacy by Lindsay Buroker

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I got this book as part of a StoryBundle.com bundle - I wouldn’t have otherwise bought book #8.6 out of a series I’ve never read. But the description said it worked as a standalone story. In the intro to the book, the author confirms this. So I jumped in.

This book did not disappoint. It was an incredibly fast read - I think my ereader (Kobo) marked it as 155 pages. But Buroker does a good job of quickly setting up the world and our characters before jumping into the main plot. I don’t know if the main series is like this, but the narrative is a lot more fun than you’d think based on the cover (I know, I know…. don’t just a book by its cover) or the description. There are heavy topics discussed and there’s death and violence. But there’s also a sweet married relationship that involves flirting and innuendoes. There are pilots who make wry comments. The main characters don’t take themselves too seriously except when it makes sense to the plot.

The Sins of Our Fathers by James S.A. Corey

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This novella occurs after the events of the last novel and brings us up to date with the ONE person who we didn’t get a conclusion for in the main series. I remember wondering if James SA Corey had forgotten about this person. But no, they were just saving them off for their own novella. It’s a very fast read and I really like the mixed message of the ending. It also must have been interesting writing this (I assume) as COVID raged around us and showed JSAC how well it could and couldn’t unite us.