spectru
6/5/2016
This is a good old-fashioned space opera, written with a more modern outlook. (The warm puppies probably don't like it.) I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I liked the spacer slang, the shorthand language they use. A little bit of it is familiar to those of us who enjoy space operas, but much of it was new. In some of the old space operas from the golden age, some of the slang seems kind of dumb, but most of this seemed pretty appropriate. To name a few: sib for ansible; scrib for an advanced version of our digital tablets; Stars as an expletive, as in "Oh, stars!", certainly no worse than "Space!" that Asimov loved. Artigrav was a new one on me. The first few times I read it as antigrav, which didn't seem quite to make sense. Then I saw that it's artigrav - artificial gravity, in the space ship.
This is a fairly long novel, a little over 500 pages, longer than is my usual preference. I made good progress, though, and looked forward to each evening's reading sessions. The epilogue seemed a bit extended, and perhaps the ending of the novel could have been reduced by say fifty pages. I think that in part the epilogue, the seeds are sown for a sequel, maybe more than one, which I fully expect to read.
Becky Chambers has arrived.