We'll see! I'm definitely approaching this one with much lower expectations than Memory, both from my own experience and from the way everyone whom I've seen talk about it seems to have liked this book less than the first one.
Hmm, I have bounced off Becky Chambers in the past, but it is probably time to try again :D
If you bounced off 'Small Angry Planet' -- I have a, uh, complicated relationship with that book (see icon), but I was impressed enough with Chambers's worldbuilding that I kept on reading the series, and I think book 2 (Close and Common Orbit) is a much better book (structurally, thematically, etc.) than Angry Planet, and book 3 is definitely an unusual book, but I also liked it a lot. I feel like Chambers leveled up as an author with every subsequent novel in the series (looking forward to book 4 shortly), which has been pretty cool to see, and when Wayfarers won the series Hugo last year, I was actually pretty pleased. ETA: Oh, and I meant to say, I think they can actually all be read as stand-alones, although book 2 does spoil a major emotional beat in book 1, if one cares about that.
I know you read the non-Wayfarers novella for Hugo homework and didn't care for it much, but I never made it past the first page on that one (not that I hated it, just, it was 2020) so I don't have any kind of useful data point on other books relative to that one.
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Hmm, I have bounced off Becky Chambers in the past, but it is probably time to try again :D
If you bounced off 'Small Angry Planet' -- I have a, uh, complicated relationship with that book (see icon), but I was impressed enough with Chambers's worldbuilding that I kept on reading the series, and I think book 2 (Close and Common Orbit) is a much better book (structurally, thematically, etc.) than Angry Planet, and book 3 is definitely an unusual book, but I also liked it a lot. I feel like Chambers leveled up as an author with every subsequent novel in the series (looking forward to book 4 shortly), which has been pretty cool to see, and when Wayfarers won the series Hugo last year, I was actually pretty pleased. ETA: Oh, and I meant to say, I think they can actually all be read as stand-alones, although book 2 does spoil a major emotional beat in book 1, if one cares about that.
I know you read the non-Wayfarers novella for Hugo homework and didn't care for it much, but I never made it past the first page on that one (not that I hated it, just, it was 2020) so I don't have any kind of useful data point on other books relative to that one.