Emily’s Comments (group member since Sep 01, 2016)

Emily’s comments from the The Long Way... To a Common Orbit flash group group.

Yep. Worked fine from the ol' laptop. Links are there and beautifully linky.

It just looks like text rather than a link, and tapping it does nothing but make me look like an obsessed monkey.
I'll try from my laptop and see. Some the Goodreads settings are easier to mess with that way. I'm just lazy and do everything on my phone. 🙂

I feel silly for asking, but how do I open the spoilers? Doing this from my phone.

Finally finished! I liked this one more than the first and felt I was able to appreciate her imagination with fewer things distracting me. Maybe that was because her focus was on fewer characters.
I liked the two storylines, but had mixed feelings about how rapidly it switched back and forth. On one hand, it was easy to find a stopping point if I needed one, but on the other, I would have liked to sink into one character's story a little longer before switching gears.
I'm glad they rescued OWL, and happy that meant an AI friend for Sidra. I really like what the author did with her journey and her ultimate solutions to living in a body.
I wonder if the next book will have a connection with characters we already know, or if she'll be in a completely different part of the universe.

I didn't see a thread for the Sidra chapter directly after this one, but I loved this quote about how she felt while people all around her were getting more and more tipsy:
"Relieved as Sidra had been to get a corner seat, she had reached a point where the desire for different input outweighed the comfort gained by staying put."
I always desire different input in that situation too!
I'm enjoying both viewpoints, but I feel myself getting sucked into the Jane chapters more and more. Owl seems a lot like Lovelace in the first book. Would they have deliberately programmed things like kindness into ship AI's? As a safety measure perhaps? Or is this more the author's idea of how an AI would evolve?

It occurred to me the other day that the word "mother" has a whole different definition for these kids.

I liked that scene of accommodating Sidra's visual comfort zone too. That was sweet.

Beth, thanks for figuring that out. I'm reading on kindle as well.
Mrs. Jospeh, the quotes at the beginning are great identifiers for the chapters. I don't know how else you'd do it either.

I loved how the windows appeared in that underwater transport.
Years ago, I took the Chunnel from London to Paris, and I was excited about it until I realized it felt exactly like being in a train going through a very long tunnel. Nothing to see.

That is one of the things I really liked about the first novel, that the author didn't come at things strictly from a human perspective.

I liked that too, Mrs. Joseph-the description of what it felt like to go from having her awareness and presence spread out over an entire ship to being limited to one spot at a time and feeling trapped.
Interesting perspective, considering the object of giving her a body was liberation.

I'm in. I'll do my best not to comment 5 months after everyone else this time.
Congratulations on the job change, Carol. Best of luck!

I would have liked to see more on that too. It was such a tricky situation. On an entirely selfish note, I was glad Ohan was cured so she could stop using plural pronouns. I never got used to that.
Mrs. Joseph, I liked your explanation of Corbin's wanting to be there for someone like Sissex was for him.
I see the 2nd book is about Lovelace. I wonder how much the others will show up, if at all.

Interesting perspective. I was taking his little speech to Ohan at face value. I hadn't considered that it might just be his way of explaining to himself, justifying to himself (let's face it-Ohan probably didn't know what was going on) what he was doing.
I like to think he was doing it for Ohan and the crew too, doing what no one else was willing to do (but maybe really wanted to do) because it was against their moral code.
Thanks for checking back and engaging with someone so late to the party!

Finally finished. What a great conversation-I'm sorry I missed it. Maybe next time I'll be more on the ball about finishing. I don't have much to add to all the impressively deep thoughts here, except regarding Corbin's treatment of Ohan. I thought it was a very self-aware, utilitarian thing to do. He knew he was doing something against Ohan's wishes, and he knew it would be best for the crew and probably Ohan. And he was the only one who could do it, as the jackass of the crew who probably couldn't make them dislike him any more than they already did. And there were no job-related consequences. I've complained here and in my review that solutions to problems in this book were very tidy. Maybe this one was too, but I liked it anyway.

This is where things really slowed down for me-long dialogue between characters that felt like it was being used to get some explanations out of the way.
I know I commented on world-building through dialogue earlier as something I liked about this book, so now I sound like a jerk, but it started annoying me at this point. I agree with the point about Rosemary's big reveal being something of a fizzle, although it did make that aspect of the book less predictable. Sounds like there might be some later excitement about it, though.
I did like the encounter with the hatchlings and I'm enjoying the vivid descriptions throughout the book. It's easy to visualize Chambers' imagined world.
I'm just a little bored with the pacing at this point.
You all are probably bored with my pacing in getting this read.

It's not keeping me from enjoying it either, as persnickety as I might be coming across. I like her imagination a lot. I love it that there's a bot for everything.

I don't know if I can put a finger on it, what gives me the feeling of getting glimpses behind the curtain (which I think is better wording for what I'm trying to say). I liked what happened in the scene, but I didn't like how tidily it happened. To a certain extent, it felt like I was watching an author play with a neat idea-writing a confrontational scene that doesn't end in one group clearly winning over another. Maybe if the scene had taken longer to play out, I wouldn't have felt that way.

I liked that a scene like this could end with little bloodshed (poor Ashby) instead of one group conquering another. It was a nice change from the norm (at least in what I read) and another way to show a shift toward pacifism in humans. At the same time, I didn't feel like she completely pulled it off, and it came across as an author showing her ideals through story, rather than simply the next piece of the story. I don't have an objection to authors doing this. I just object to their doing it in a way that I notice.

I don't know if I worded it very well before. I think characters in the far future, especially well-traveled characters, could be very tolerant and accepting of differences. That part makes sense. It's just that sometimes these guys seem too good, like more of an ideal than a fleshed-out character. To be fair, I'm not even halfway yet.