Wayfarers
I was so delighted by Monk and Robot that I sought out Becky Chambers’s prior works, which is primarily the Wayfarers series, consisting of four novels and a short story; I found each story wonderful but was floored by the middle two novels to the point where I’ve re-examined my surfacing patterns to find more work in this vein because I’m disappointed I didn’t hear about them sooner.
Wayfarers is set some hundreds of years in the future amidst a post-galactic war Milky Way where human refugees of an uninhabitable Earth are discovered and inducted into a prosperity-seeking Galactic Commons (GC) post-war, post-empire government consisting of a half-dozen other species and excluding about eight more that we hear of: a variety spanning reptiles, mollusks, crab-centaurs, and mech-suit wearing birds. It isn’t “space opera” fare – humans are not somehow more special or versatile, instead mostly pacifists, and often treated with sympathy or pity. The world is consistent and logical (though not hard science), and world-building is often intertwined with foreshadowing in a way such that several plot points feel like natural consequences.
The stories are each different in nature, but focus primarily on inter-personal relationships, personal struggles, and what it means to be a part of a family or society. They are all deeply empathic. While there is much more drama and danger than in Monk and Robot, nearly all immediately dangerous situations resolves quickly, and the only real persistent antagonists are cultural or political forces in the versus society sort of conflict. None of the stories rely too much on each other for continuity, though all of them benefit from the context of the first, both in terms of setting up the world but also because it introduces characters featured in each subsequent story.
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is a road trip story about found family aboard a construction ship (the Wayfarer), initially from the perspective of a newcomer looking to get away from her former life, but it eventually focuses on each crew member, what brings them to the Wayfarer and the complex web of relationships between them all. It is a very different kind of book from anything I’ve read before and I’m not surprised it originally had to find its audience via Kickstarter.
The rest of the stories could be read in any order – there’s no overarching narrative, no shared thread of continuity, just… excellent stories in a rich, nuanced world. The main reason I’m going into each book, however, is because both the second and third hit me pretty hard.
A Good Heretic is a short story following Mas, who we meet in The Long Way, and saying much more would spoil some parts of that book. It’s short, and if your library has Infinite Stars: Dark Frontiers it’s worth a read.
A Closed and Common Orbit is a story about starting over and finding one’s place in the world; it is also more fundamentally about what it means to be considered – or not – a person by one’s society. It contains spoilers for the ending of The Long Way, and while that spoiler is hinted at in the book’s marketing blurb, I’d advise against reading too much about this book until reading the first one because it’s too good to spoil. I’m taking care to avoid spoilers here.
Common Orbit interleaves viewpoints from two protagonists introduced as side-characters in the first book: Sidra is adjusting to a new life she feels unfit for in aftermath of The Long Way, and Pepper, a gifted technician born into slavery, with the backstory of how she escaped. Both their stories hit me pretty hard: Sidra struggles to fit in and hide a dangerous secret while dealing with stark body dysmorphia and extreme neurodiversity, which resonated with many things I’ve experienced and talked about in therapy; Pepper’s story is both a damning indictment of consumerism and about what it means to be a survivor:
in that moment, she could feel a bridge stretching between her as she was right then – giggling and gasping in a spaceship kitchen – to her at four years old, sucking algae gunk from her nails in the dark. She felt as though she could reach out to that little girl and pull her through the years. Look, she’d say. Look who you’re gonna be. Look where you’re gonna go.
Pepper’s story should speak to anyone who’s ever wished they could reach back through the years to their former self to offer encouragement to not give up.
The POV chapters are sometimes interspersed with chat logs, which I found delightful, and as someone who spends a lot of time on group chat I would have loved more of them.
The final third of the book sees the two interleaved perspectives start intertwining, and – sealing the deal for becoming one of my personal favorite books – concludes in a heist. The book has a satisfying conclusion that I wish would have been extrapolated on just a bit more.
Record of a Spaceborn Few didn’t hit me as hard, personally; but it speaks to a similar notion of what it means to live intentionally as Monk and Robot, the purpose of shared culture, and the costs of cultural exclusivity. It centers humans, but a human society vastly different from ours: the Exodus fleet, who having fled to the stars and realized what they lost, built their society anew:
“By our laws, he is assured shelter and passage here. If we have food, he will eat. If we have air, he will breathe. If we have fuel, he will fly. He is son to all grown, brother to all still growing. We will care for him, protect him, guide him. We welcome you, Amias, to the decks of the Asteria, and to the journey we take together.”
It follows five disconnected characters and their parts surrounding a tragedy that shakes Exodan society, but it is not a tragic book – it is a very hopeful one. I enjoyed reading each of the characters, but particularly saw a lot of myself in both Sawyer, an outsider trying to fit in, and Kip, a teenager trying to fit in. But the magic in this story isn’t so much in the characters themselves as it is in their understanding of their shared heritage and what it means to them in the face of its original purpose being outlived: The Exodans don’t have anything to export and have been reliant on the charity of the GC, and more glamorous or exciting ways of life are available elsewhere.
As a person who doesn’t have much in the way of family history culture myself – my known ancestry is mostly English, Dutch, and French, but as of my birth year are all at least a hundred years removed from Europe, and two generations before me were scattered by the Dust Bowl to California; and as someone who as a parent is working (and often struggling) to create intentional traditions with my own family – this book spoke to me about the importance of inherited culture and shared experience.
The Galaxy, and the Ground Within is centered on a small handful of nonhuman strangers stuck at the space equivalent of a truck stop during a catastrophe that prevents them from leaving. Where most authors would write about the people fixing that problem, or make it the start of something more threatening, Chambers instead treats us to a wonderful meditation on cultural differences unencumbered by earthen history. While there are earthen analogs to the Harmagian Empire and their subjugation of the Akaraks, the Quelins’ xenophobia, and the Aeluons’ sacred cultural norms, we can hear each characters perspectives and how they’re personally grappling with those without the baggage we’d bring to an equivalent story set on Earth.
There are no big conflicts, but some characters make rather large personal decisions influenced by their interactions with the others. There are discussions of politics and what it means to make moral decisions in an imperfect world that feel very raw and sincere; what it means to agree to disagree; about how physical differences impact worldviews and culture; and an absolutely hilarious bit about cheese (the human food) from the perspective of nonhuman characters which had me laughing so loudly my partner asked me to stop, and serves to underscore the idea that everyone’s culture seems weird to someone else.
This book didn’t carry the same weight for me that either Common Orbit or Spaceborn Few did, but few do, and I still enjoyed it quite a bit and highly recommend it.
Chambers has finished her time in the Galactic Commons which is sad but understandable. I enjoyed my time there immensely, and am planning a re-read next year.