PositiveThe AV Club...it’s those relationships where Chambers excels. She has a gift for creating alien biology, culture, and social mores with far more depth and complexity than anything Star Trek’s forehead-of-the-week makeup department could churn out ... A Closed And Common Orbit makes a radical move for a sequel, abandoning the first book’s leads entirely in favor of two minor characters: Lovelace, the ship’s sentient on-board computer, now in a human-like body, and Pepper, the engineer who put her there ... While most sequels feel the need to go bigger and bolder, Orbit is a more intimate story than its predecessor, exploring trust, the mind/brain paradox, and unease with one’s body, while examining the ways someone without a family makes their way in the world and forms their own connections. As good as Chambers’ first book was at world-building, her second is more an attempt at world-cultivating, focusing in close on a small story that still suggests a wider galaxy worth exploring in further installments.
