North Continent Ribbon

This was an utterly lovely read. Ursula fleshes out a world and it's conflicts across hundreds of years through six short tales, each of which felt like they could have been spun out into their own novels entirely.

The world building is excellent, but what really caught me was the attention to small details. The texture of a man's beard, the pattern on a ribbon, subtle shifts in speech. The way Ursula elaborates on small, important details make you feel embedded in the scene, like you yourself are experiencing Nakharat across a small, short selection of days.

The book doesn't overstay it's welcome. It's not terribly long, and while I hope one day I might return to Nakharat, I'm very pleased with the time I got to spend there.

This novella is a sequence of character-driven science fiction short stories all set around the same planet. Unlike something like How High We Go in the Dark which has interconnecting characters, North Continent Ribbon's story cycle takes place over longer periods of time. It slowly layers its worldbuilding with each story, along with themes of machine intelligence, unions, responsibility, and promises.

I had a lot of fun with these stories. I love the idea of promises and commitment in this world being explicit physical ribbons that are worn (and hidden) in hair; how much more binding promises feel in a world where they are physical objects; also, the vulnerability and privacy around sharing promises with others.