Becky – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

June 16, 2024

A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Review)

nother Norfolk used bookstore find (someone tossed it, to my gain). The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is a tale about a tunnel ship (that makes the warp paths other ships can use. In this universe, a divided human race (after our planet’s collapse there were those who stayed in system, and those who joined a refugee fleet) finds itself as members of the Galactic Commons, a sort of UN in space sort of thing. Rosemary Harper has signed up on Wayfarer to be their ship’s clerk. But she has a history, something she is hiding. But the […]

July 28, 2024

A Closed and Common Orbit (Review)

his is a very loose followup to A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Becky Chamber’s breakout novel. I was very surprised to see the direction she took this – rather than stay with the ship Wayfarer and the interesting characters she’d developed, she went a totally different and interesting direction – centering on Pepper (the mech they brushed up against earlier in the story) and the newly rebooted (i.e. personality-dead) ship’s AI who needed to be removed from the ship. I was like where are we going with this? With a touch of but I liked the old […]

September 1, 2024

Record of a Spaceborn Few (Review)

idn’t we just talk about this author? Becky Chambers, writer of A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and A Closed and Common Orbit. She’s that author who takes a wondrous set of characters and locations and trashes them, telling the story with edge-case characters and briefly-mentioned locations. You aren’t getting sausage grinding with this author. You get a new telling of a new perspective in a “loose universe”. I like this, if only because it is ballsy writing. So in Record of a Spaceborn Few, earlier books have hinted that when the Earth collapsed into ecological disaster, the […]

December 29, 2024

The Galaxy and the Ground Within (Review)

hree aliens walk into a bar. Well, rather, a B&B rest stop. The last (so far) of Becky Chambers’ award-winning series about distant and dissimilar characters. For this one, we have Pei (who was referenced in one of the other books or two as the first book’s captain’s lover). So the story here is that there is a jump point in the literal middle of nowhere (and in space, there is a lot of nowhere). Alien ships from every race pass through this location and on a dead planet in the center of this space roundabout, there are domes and […]