The explanation – “On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.” If you don’t know how the #SixDegrees meme works, please check Kate’s blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest. It’s interesting and the participants are creative and intelligent so it’s fun. This post is my contribution. (Thanks, Kate, for having me.)

First off,  I thought I’d read Orbital but alas, although I do own the book I have zero memory of it and it’s not noted in my blog.  Shoot!  I’ll have to read it now, guess. (But uff-da, as my Norwegian grand-mama would say.)  

What I found in my blog was a book called Phantom Orbit by David Ignatius which I read in late May of this past year (2024).  So I’ll connect those two to start me off. (LOL!).  

https://mybecky.blog/2024/05/27/phantom-orbit-by-david-ignatius/

1.  So first up is Orbital by Samantha Harvey and leads to ..

2.  Phantom Orbit by David Ignatious which I enjoyed and gave it an A on my rating scale (1-10 for literature and A-F for more “genre” books – some books are both – literary mysteries for instance).  Ivan (from Moscow) and Edith  (from the CIA) meet in Beijing where they work on satellite systems and fall in love. They go home but later, much later, there a connection is made. –  … which leads me to …

3. The Maniac by  Benjamin Labatut – yes, it’s another “sci-fi,” but this time we have a guy who’s probably somewhere on the Autism spectrum (as they say now) but plays a mean game of “GO.”  He’s so good in fact that he’s scheduled to play in a world tournament involving computers – or A computer, I should say. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

The computer and the game are called “Alpha Go.”  

4.  And then we move another degree out to The Three-Body Problem which is a serious and classic type of Science Fiction tale from Chinese author, Liu Cixin (2008). And Cixin developed that tale into two more books so it became The Three-Body-Problem trilogy dealing in all kinds of physics problems   The trilogy is also known as “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” trilogy.

5. And The Three-Body-Problem kinda-sorta reminds me of  The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin because of the duality (which doesn’t exist)  in everything.  Or else all is one. . 

And you will note that these are all linked by more than being recent Sci-Fi ( except LeGuin’s is a bit older.)

6.  Finally, in the sixth link of a chain I can only think to come up with something by Connie Willis – female sci-fi writer extraordinaire!   She’s also quite Christian which is apparent in her delightful anthology of sci-fi short stories, “A Lot Like Christmas.”  (I’m going to have to read that again next year. It’s wonderful.)

Becky