Becky Chambers (1) (1985–)

To my own mild puzzlement, I have to say that I had fun spending time with the Wayfarer crew and that I want to visit with them again soon.

Why the puzzlement?

Well, this isn't usually my kind of Science Fiction.

If I had to give this book a tagline, I'd go with Nice People In Space or A Long Way To Discovering The Value Of Diversity And The Power Of Making A Crew Into Your Chosen Family.

My expectations of Space Opera were set by Banks, Corey, Leckie, Powell and Reynolds. I expected big themes, show more dark plots, violent conflicts, advanced weaponry and ruthless people brokering power. I quickly saw that this book was aiming for something quite different, I just didn't know what.

At first, I thought it was a riff on Star Trek TNG, stripped of its thinly-disguised military structure and freed from the need to solve the universe's problems.

When I finally put aside my 'this is like...' mindset and took the book on its own terms, I started to have fun, albeit very wholesome 'Goodnight, John Boy' Waltons' Mountains fun, redecorated with peace stickers and rainbow flags.

If this book had not been so well done, if the cultures had not been so well-imagined, if the characters were not so engaging, If I hadn't ended up holding my breath waiting to find out the fate of the ship's AI, I would have been gently mocking this book. Instead, I'm mocking myself for having cynicism ingrained in my imagination like machine oil in the skin of a mechanics hands.

Yes, I can see that there's strong messaging here about diversity and choice and pacifism and tolerance that ought to be setting off my propaganda alarms like the storyline on a Christian channel show about raising a family with the grace of God, but the thing is that it works so well that I got all wrapped up in it.

I liked the crew. I liked being shown the different backgrounds that they came from and the different ways that they saw the world. I liked that those differences weren't sanded down into a smooth, 'We're all Starfleet, whatever our species' monoculture, but were bolted together, much like the Wayfarer itself, into something with a unique, improbable, not particularly pretty, that worked because it played to everyone's strengths. I liked that none of the crew carried or used weapons. Ever. Even when boarded by pirates or border patrols or surrounded by warships. They just weren't that kind of people. They made wormhole tunnels that allowed people to travel safely and quickly outside normal space. They were passionate about food and drink and tech toys and each other. They were alien to each other (four different organic species and one AI) and they were family to each other. And that was the point.

So, here I am going: 'A long book in which not much happened (at least on a galactic scale) except me getting to know a crew real well and enjoy the credible optimism and shared strength that they gifted to one another.'

I ought to be going 'Walton's in space? No thanks!' Instead. I'm going, 'What was the name of the second book in the series?' (It's 'A Closed A Common Orbit' in case you were wondering)

All of which is a tribute to Becky Chambers' storytelling and to Patricia Rodriguez's excellent narration. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample


https://soundcloud.com/hodderbooks/the-long-way-to-a-small-angry-planet-by-becky... show less

“The Hateful Eight” is one of my favorite Quentin Tarantino movies. Naturally, given the director’s penchant for gleeful mayhem, a blizzard that strands strangers in a cabin must end in a storm of bullets and blood. This is what passes for cultural exchange in a Tarantino universe.

In a Becky Chambers universe, cultural exchange under such constraints involves much more conversation and much less death. In the fourth and final installment of her “Wayfarers” series, Chambers gins up show more the equivalent of a technological blizzard to strand three travelers on Gora, a planetary waystation between Galactic Commons (GC) systems. Until the sky is clear, these alien species will navigate the tricky business of being very different in very close quarters.

The parallel I draw between Chambers and Tarantino isn’t just for kicks. Tarantino sets his story in Wyoming Territory in 1877, a wilderness populated by the scars and prejudices of the Civil War. Everyone trapped in Minnie’s Haberdashery has an agenda and a willingness to enforce it with violence. If Tarantino has a vision of multiculturalism, it’s one in which community dies on the altar of greed and hate.

Chambers, on the other hand, is a gentle yet firm booster of the multicultural experiment that slowly germinated beneath the post-WWII shield of the Pax Americana. Each of her aliens is so dissimilar as to defy the notion of unity. The Aeluon, universally acclaimed as the most beautiful species, communicate through color and are the GC’s premiere military arm — elites by any measure. The Quelin are crustaceans whose harsh xenophobia flags their space with permanent travel warnings. The small, long-limbed, beaked Akarak unsettle everyone as clannish vagabonds at the edges of society.

This is the diverse galaxy of Chambers’s title, “The Galaxy, and the Ground Within.” To share a galaxy means to share space with people who aren’t you and never will be. Distinctions might be something as mundane as food; I quite enjoyed the alien bonding over the loathsome human passion for cheese. But distinctions might embrace touchstones as powerful as love, sex, family, peace, and war. A commonwealth forged of contradictory alloys will last only so long as its members choose to listen, learn, and respect another’s right to their opinions whether you like them or not.

What makes this kind of respect possible is understanding that everyone carries her own ground within. As the interlude on Gora lengthens, we dig deeply into the lore of each stranded species. The Aeluon, for all their elite status, are molded by war and the demands of defending the unnatural peace of the GC. Quelin xenophobia, however ruthless, is a flight from the horrors of their past. The Akarak’s long and painful history with the GC has backed them into an unorthodox view of the galactic order.

The truth is that in a galaxy that feels endlessly adrift, each of us stands on internal ground that shapes us just as surely as we had no part in shaping it. That’s not to say we can’t reshape the ground on which we stand, even if the cost is as great as that paid by Quelin who buck their people’s ways. But we can’t fully escape the tectonic shifts that formed our inner continents long before we were born. We share the same galaxy, but we stand on different ground.

To live in peace with yourself and with others is a fragile thing, and never more than one charismatic fearmonger away from fracturing into fratricide. If we are to avoid the zero-sum bloodletting of a snowbound Tarantino cabin, I must do the hardest thing of all: recognize that your inner world is just as valid as my own, even and especially if I can’t agree with it. I can either do unto you as I would have you do unto me, or I can do unto you before you do unto me. We always stand at the crossroads of harmony and Armageddon. show less

“Just the sight of the room felt like she'd taken a sip of water after several hours without.”
I had a similar reaction when starting this book, shortly after I’d been unexpectedly ambushed by upsetting memories of my father’s death. Yet I finished this at the start of October, and it’s now mid-March; somehow I couldn't bring myself to review it sooner.

This is a standalone story, though it picks up from the end of The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers #1). As usual, show more Chambers drops the reader into situations, maybe explaining later, maybe not. She explores identity, culture, community, colonialism, reparations, and the cycle of life, with warmth and insight through engaging, relatable characters, most of them human. It’s character, rather than plot-driven (especially the first third, where each chapter is from a different, and apparently unconnected, character’s viewpoint) and set mainly among humans on the decaying Exodus Fleet: a quasi-socialist utopia, where: “Everybody had a home, and nobody went hungry.”

It’s an easy and heartwarming read, because it has the need for connection and community at its core, but there is plenty to chew on as well.

Image: ‘Elastika’ by Zaha Hadid Architects, adding connections to an architectural space of The Moore, Miami, in 2005 (Source)

Adrift

The Exodan ritual for naming and registering a baby, starts with words about how humans destroyed the Earth and so had to leave. It ends:
“From the ground, we stand. From our ships we live. By the stars, we hope.”
And the liturgy for the dead includes:
“From the stars, came the ground. From the ground, we stood. To the ground, we return.”

But the ships left ten generations ago. Those living there now have little connection to it, and none to anywhere else - yet. The Galactic Commons wants “to prepare GC-bound Exodans for life beyond the Fleet” and integrate them into the wider Galactic Community.

The big political and cultural tensions around that contrast with small scale domestic issues like stroppy teens and small children not wanting to go to bed.

Food

“The twice-round pickle felt like a salty, sour hug, and the hot sauce skirted that line between ‘ow, this hurts, please stop’ and ‘I want to eat this forever’.”
Eating isn’t just a necessity, it’s a core part of most cultures, and Chambers always delights in describing the looks, smells, tastes, and textures of different cuisines, especially those of non-human species. (In the first Wayfarers book, Dr Chef was one of the most endearing characters.)
“A large mound of wet, shredded vegetables, piled on top of two halves of a nondescript bun… It leaked, sending purple liquid running down his forearms… He took a bite> His throat tightened, his sinuses shot open, and his bravery died… It was, without a doubt, the worst thing he’d ever eaten… The tea, at least, was good.”

Image: Exodan spaceship from the cover of some editions

Quotes

• “The trick to living on Mushtullo was knowing which sunrise to wait for… The pre-dawn fog carried the kind of wetness that wormed its way to your bones.”

• “Nothing is left to lesser people, because there is no such thing,”

• “Everything Martian… was understood to be dangerously incompatible with Exodan morality.”

• “A person’s view of the stars was, ultimately, a matter of perspective. Of upbringing.”

• “Ghosts were imaginary, but hauntings were real.”

• “Our species doesn’t operate by reality. It operates by stories. Cities are a story. Money is a story. Space was a story, once.”

• “Seeing so many singular things made him realise he came from somewhere singular, too… The Fleet was priceless. The only one. If it was gone, there wouldn’t just be nothing for other Humans to learn from. There’d be nothing for him to learn from.” show less

Chambers, Becky. A Psalm for the Wild-Built. Monk & Robot No. 1. Tordotcom, 2021.
Becky Chambers’ new series of novellas seems to be in conversation with both Isaac Asimov and Samuel Beckett. The series is set in the desert of a post-apocalyptic world in which, with unaccountable generosity, humanity freed robot workers as soon as they showed signs of sentience. When the robots left for the wastelands, the economy collapsed. Centuries later, humanity has developed a prosperous, sustainable, show more non-industrial economy that values all life. No one has seen robots in centuries. A young man named Dex is not happy in this utopia and decides to wander in the desert to discover the world and himself. There he meets a robot that calls itself Mosscap. It turns out that robots name themselves after the first thing they see when they become conscious, which in Mosscap’s case was a mushroom. The two of them wander on foot, vaguely looking for the ruins of a semi-legendary factory from the bygone industrial era. They discuss the nature of personhood and the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. They are quirky and loveable characters. Their conversation is insightful and fresh and much more hopeful than the conversation Beckett gave us in Waiting for Godot. 4 stars. show less