Record of a Spaceborn Few (Wayfarers #3)

I read the book in its entirety and halfway through it I thought, where is the build up to some kind of climax? I LOVED “The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet” and “A Closed and Common Orbit.” The first book had a throwaway main character. But, the second book was amazing. I love the world she’s describing. I love that it has a whole history and each species have their own ethos. I love that her world accepts gay relationships freely and that sex work is treated as a true calling. I love so much about the first two books that I found myself kind of disappointed in this third installment. It pains me to say it. I LOVE most of her characters from Record of a Spaceborn Few. It was interesting and I liked that there were basically epilogues for the characters. It was a lovely book really. But it had no REAL conflict. There’s a death that only serves as fodder for introspection for the other characters. I can’t say that I disliked the book at all. I just found it more of a rumination than a gripping story. I will try her next book, definitely.

Chambers’ Wayfarers stories are set in the Galactic Commons, a galactic federation of intelligent species, most of them significantly older than the newcomer humans. Each has looked at a different part of life in the Galactic Commons. This one is set in the Exodus Fleet, the fleet carrying the descendants of the last humans to leave Earth, fleeing its environmental collapse.

They’re a distinctly different culture from the humans who settled Mars and the outer planets prior to that final collapse. Originally, they were looking for an Earthlike planet to start over on, and they wanted their descendants to be prepared for planetary life. In addition to their quite functional food- and oxygen-producing farms, they have decorative oxygen gardens, theaters that show nature videos of Earth, murals on the walls that, functionally, don’t need to be anything but bare metal.

They also guard against the development of the competition and divisions that helped destroy Earth. Everyone has windows onto space in their living quarters. Everyone is guaranteed “if we have food they will eat, if we have air they will breathe, if we have fuel they will fly.” Their economic system is barter.

And membership in the Galactic Commons has brought changes, changes that can disrupt this system.

Tessa is a supervisor in salvage operations–managing and sorting what comes in, sending it on to where those materials are most useful, making sure nothing goes to waste. She has two children, a husband with his own ship and work that takes him and that ship out of the fleet for extended periods, and an aging father. Her husband, George, is earning the Galactic credits the Exodan fleet didn’t need before joining the Galactic Commons. Her father has failing eyesight and needs an eye replacement that is Galactic tech, not fleet tech–and which will need those credits George is earning.

Those credits, in larger context, may also be about to buy AI technology that will eliminate the job Tessa has been doing for twenty years, and which she loves. If it happens, she’ll find other work, and the security of her family won’t be threatened, because this is the Fleet, but…it’s making her uneasy, and restless.

Isabel is an archivist. This means the obvious keeping and preserving of records, but it also mean being the officiant at weddings, births, and funerals. She has a love of history and knowledge; she corresponds with scholars outside the fleet. One, a Harmargian, a member of a species that was distinctly divided on whether humans should be admitted to the Commons, has come to visit and observe.

Eyas is a caretaker; she prepares the bodies of the deceased for composting and return to the soil that helps the fleet live, and counsels the families of the deceased. It’s work she loves, finds meaningful, and always wanted to do. Yet she fells there’s a piece missing, something more she could be doing as well.

Sawyer is a young man descended from a family that left the Fleet, to settle on a planet. They moved around, never really staying on one planet, and then an epidemic struck for which Galactic medicine didn’t yet have proper treatment for humans. They developed it quickly, but Sawyer was the only survivor. At 24, he’s decided to go check out his family’s original home, try something new to him. He meets Eyas, who impatiently gives him a little advice about how to start fitting in with the Exodans. And he meets a man who connects with with job salvaging materials from a wrecked ship.

Kip is a teenager feeling restless and dissatisfied. He has no idea what he wants to do, he’s not sure he wants to stay in the fleet, and he has a friend with perhaps more intellectual firepower (not that Kip isn’t smart), but perhaps not as good judgment or concern for others.

They’re all trying to find their way, all being affected by the changes that are coming to the fleet, now that they’re part of the Galactic Commons and have been settled, not on planet, but around an otherwise unused star. Their culture is surviving, but also growing and changing. This is a story about how they cope, how they adapt, what they feel and think and do. It’s about decent people trying to make the right decisions, for themselves and those they care about, in changing circumstances.

For me, that makes it the best kind of story. Chambers makes these people you can care about, and want good outcomes for.

Highly recommended.

I bought this book.

The third installment of Becky Chambers’ wonderful “Wayfarers” series continues with this visit to the Exodus Fleet. Long ago, when Earth became too contaminated and wrecked to continue to sustain life, humankind built a fleet of generation ships to carry them to a new home. When they eventually encountered the Galactic Commons, they were given a new star to orbit around, a few gifts of technology to allow them to survive, and granted membership among the many species of the galaxy. Some humans have chosen to leave the fleet and live on other planets among alien races, but many continue to live as members of the Exodan Fleet.

The book follows a variety of different characters — Tessa, a woman questioning her place in the Fleet; Kip, a teenager trying to figure out where he belongs; Sawyer, a newcomer trying to forge a place among people who don’t trust him yet; Isabel, an older woman working in the Archives to preserve human history; Eyas, a caretaker for the dead and counselor for mourners; and Ghuh’loloan, an alien visiting the Fleet to document life among humans.

Much of the book is fairly plotless as we follow these people through their lives and experiences, though the story opens with an unprecedented disaster for the Fleet and later hits the characters with a more personal but far-reaching tragedy.

The greatest joy of this book is the outstanding characters. Our lead characters are all very different people, and all are brilliantly realized, from Kip’s aimless angst to Isabel’s wise elder who still manages to learn new things, from Tessa’s often harried domestic frustrations to Sawyer’s naive idealism. Even the supporting cast is full of fascinating and true-to-life characterization.

It’s also great to have a book that’s so positive and so open to diversity of all kinds. The “Wayfarers” universe is incredibly vast, and there’s room for everyone inside it. There’s a variety of pronouns and races — it’s such a hopeful idea that humankind could eventually grow past the prejudices and petty hatreds of the present day.

And the book doesn’t neglect that there are other problems that’d come up, too — there are questions of how advanced technology can cause people to lose jobs, that a society built around barter would struggle to deal with how currency could upset the balance that’s been built. There’s no question that humanity is in a better place — but not all challenges have been cleared away yet.

If you love hopeful, positive, diverse science fiction, this book — and every book in this series — should be on your “Must Read” list.

This was a hugely anticipated book for me having thought her previous two were exceptional. This book is set within the same universe as the previous two, both literally and with the characters alluded to, so it feels very familiar. Even if the story arcs are quite independent in this book. Both the previous ones had a key moral theme driving them and very well written stories for all the main characters around this and each leaving me really pondering those moral themes when I finished them.

I finished this book and had an overwhelming feeling of ‘so what?’. I didn’t care strongly enough about any of the characters to feel particularly pleased or displeased about the outcomes of their journeys and the key theme of the book – change – just lacked a strong hook or meaningful impact. Or the stories weren’t able to make an impact with it. An issue made worse by the fact that there were a lot more key characters this time and with the author keeping within the same word limit as previously chapters were very short and lacked substance as there was a different character story each chapter. Meaning it was difficult to keep track as you jump so quickly from plot arc to plot arc and stories never really developed properly. It all just felt watered down.

Given that I love the author’s writing I would rather have had the same amount of characters but a longer book to accommodate deeper stories. On the whole though, I think the weaker key theme of this book was its undoing – it wasn’t impactful enough in the stories told. The theme of change means far more to the fleet itself but even then, only in the future outside of the stories told here. This book almost sets the stage for something significant at a later date, but what that does is reduce it, in effect, to a simple footnote in the timeline of the universe she is crafting.

Maybe the change in editor part way through was significant too and this would have been addressed if there was continuity. Either way the book isn’t the best if I’m honest. Standalone or in the context of comparison to the previous two. Had she not written two such amazing ones before she may have gotten away with it, but they are there and this book is lacking by the inevitable comparison and it has undoubtedly factored in the rating I am giving it.

Wonderful world-building and human-humane characters as usual by Ms Chambers.

I totally love Chamber’s first two books, my reviews:
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet
and the extraordinary
A Closed and Common Orbit.
A giant 5-Stars for both. True joys to read.

As usual with my reviews, please first read the publishers blurb/summary of the book. Thank you.

Full size image here

This would have been a 4-star “slice of space life” book, but for a mistake in the overall presentation: Although the prose is very good, the chapter organisation is terrible. There are 5 main characters in the Exodan Fleet, almost completely separated, with alternating 10-12 page chapters for each one, more or less.

Note below, a possible reader-solution to this mistake.

This means you only see snippets of each life once every five or more chapters. This makes the book very confusing and uneven. Even by the end of the book, I was still confusing some characters, and having difficulty remembering the recent history for them.

Just about the time you settle into one character’s life, bang. They’re gone for 4-5 chapters and you’re plopped into the middle of another life. It’s like an old car engine cranking in mid-winter and never really getting started.

Indeed, I was more than half-way through this book, struggling, before I began to remember the recent histories of each character.

Upon reflection, I do recommend that you try reading 3 or 4 chapters for each character in sequence, then go back and read 3-4 chapters for the next character, etc etc. Reduce the interleaving, as it were.

The lives of these characters, though likeable, are pretty dull. They don’t really overlap or interact at all. There’s little pressure other than a daily grind of life, and the minor supporting characters around them are presented in tiny bites.

Combined with the terrible choppiness of the chapter interleaving, this makes this book a real chore to read through. It’s taken me 6 weeks to read; not a good sign. It’s been like watching 5 different soap operas on TV while switching channels every 5 minutes.

If taken as 5 novellas, these would be solid entries in Ms Chambers canon. The world-building is excellent, the characters are human and humane, and their daily lives and troubles are familiar to all of us. There are no great personal challenges, only the living of life, which Ms Chambers presents very well.

A Puzzle (forgetting that this is the same universe as previous books):
The Exodans have been “travelling for centuries” to get where they are now, but without any serious velocity, or wormholes, or star-drives. How far could they actually be from old Earth? Even assuming they have hot-tech ion drive, where does the ejected mass come from? And assuming an exhaust velocity of 10% the speed of light, they can’t be very far from the original Sol system.

The answer is given later in the book: This universe has wormholes, and the character Tessa is the sister of Ashby from “The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet”. So all three books are set in the same universe and could share the same technologies.

For the Exodans, another puzzle: Why not mine the asteroids around Sol, or the moons of the gas giants?

You can see the beautiful heart of Chambers in her characters, one little chapter at a time, but nothing’s really happening to them. Sadly, it’s pretty dull stuff.

Of course, the final few chapters show how our characters have grown, and come to terms with their lives. This is a very nice aspect to the book, and Ms Chambers has always excelled at it.

Notes and Quotes:
28%
She wanted to be clear-headed, and these days, even one drink was enough to make her start the next day with a headache. Somewhere within, her teenage self was screaming in horror.

28%
Theyd also decided, without much fuss, that since the whole arrangement suited them both fine, they might as well get married nothing fancy, no big party or anything. Just ten minutes with an archivist and a nice dinner at the hex. None of it was love as her younger self had imagined. It was so much better.

30%
But then I began to think of the dead animals I have seen and disposed of and consumed, the ended lives I did not grieve for because I did not understand them fully. I did not see myself in them, and therefore it did not matter. I looked to this former Human this former sapient, with a family and loves and fears. Those things I could understand, even though the body was something I could not. Nothing in the room was moving, nothing was happening, and yet within me, I felt profound change. I grieved for the alien, this person I had never known. I grieved for my pet laceworms. I grieved for myself. Yet it was a quiet grief, an everyday grief, a heaviness and a lightness all at once. I was overwhelmed, yet there was no way to express that beyond silence. I do not feel I am explaining this experience well, dear guest, but perhaps that is appropriate. Perhaps none of us can truly explain death. Perhaps none of us should.

51%
She looked at Pop, entropy incarnate, and wondered if his present would be her future. She wondered which of her kids would sit in the extra chair in the exam room and lament the days when shed been awesome.

85%
“Make sure people remember that a closed system is a closed system even when you cant see the edges.”

88%
“Our species doesnt operate by reality. It operates by stories. Cities are a story. Money is a story. Space was a story, once.”

88%
“We are a longstanding species with a very short memory. If we dont keep a record, well make the same mistakes over and over.”

92%
“Some of us have to go, yes. But some of us have to stay and kick the others out. Otherwise “, He scratched his chin. “Otherwise all we know is the same place. My great-pa, he was right. Were meant to go. And were meant to stay. Stay and go, each as much as the other. ”

94%
If trying something new was valid, then keeping something old was, too.

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