4.0

I've enjoyed all three of Becky Chambers' books so far, though I don't love them as much as a lot of people do. Something about the way her characters talk to each other feels...didactic. Like, "Here's how people in a functional relationship talk to each other. Here's how mature human beings should communicate with each other." It's definitely not enough to keep me from enjoying the books, but it does keep me from loving them wholeheartedly as I otherwise might.

Anyway, what I appreciated most about this book was that it's an everyday life kind of book--only in space. Most scifi is all about plot; this book doesn't even have a plot. It's just snippets in the lives of various people about the Exodus Fleet that generations before left Earth. There's lots and lots of fun worldbuilding, explorations of how humans could live in space and what kind of systems we'd design. It's fun to just live in this world, see how it works, imagine how we might be better in the future having learned from our past.