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Oct. 28th, 2018 08:27 amFor a good half of Becky Chambers' Record of a Spaceborn Few I don't think I was having any particular feelings about it at all, except calm sort of vaguely pleasant academic ones -- intriguing world-building, I'm amazed she got away with having such a total lack of narrative structure, it does feel kind of slow --
And then I hit the end of the book and I almost started crying in my work cafeteria, and I'm still not entirely sure I can put into words why.
Record of a Spaceborn Few is the third book in the loosely-connected Wayfarers series, set in a far future where several different human cultures have survived to mingle with a vast multi-species intergalactic community. The first book is a moderately fun episodic narrative of Small Crew Of Humans And Aliens Has Adventures In Space; the second serves as an examination of AI and artificial personhood and is extremely good.
This third book, for the first time, does a deep delve into an all-human communities in this imagined future -- the Exodans, the last group to leave a destroyed Earth, who survived by building massive generation ships and setting out in search of an unknown future and landing place.
Now the Exodans have been granted a permanent patch of space round a sun and a space in the Galactic Commons, and for several generations the ships haven't searched anymore. New goods, technologies, and media are arriving from the outside world that couldn't be created within the closed atmosphere of the generation ships. Some people are leaving to live planetside; others, generally humans from the broader post-Earth human diaspora, are coming to the ships out of some kind of sense of Exodan society as a human cultural home. Exodan culture -- a post-capitalist society carefully designed to allow large numbers of people to live in a closed sphere in balance and stability -- is in flux.
The book follows several members of that society, part of the same broad community but relatively distant from each other, going about their daily lives: a working mother, a disaffected teenager, a caretaker who processes the dead, an immigrant from galactic space, an elderly archivist hosting an alien academic guest. The first half of the book is about slowly getting to know these people and their context; in the second half, they all react to a small tragedy that highlights the ways in which Exodan culture is changing, and the ways it can survive.
Record of a Spaceborn Few is, at heart, a Utopian narrative -- a flawed Utopia, a Utopia in transition or in decline, but nonetheless a Utopia that posits that humans have the capability to build a functional society, that social problems can be solved to collective benefit, and that something worth having can come out of potentially-catastrophic change. If this book has a thesis, it's that loss doesn't have to be only tragedy; it can also be transformation.
And I guess that's why I found myself trying desperately to pretend I wasn't tearing up in a public cafeteria, on a day on a week in a year when. You know.
(And how little science fiction I read that offers a sense of hope that I find believable and relevant; how few Utopias of any kind! Recommend me some, please, if you can think of any; the only thing comparable that's coming to mind right now is the Twilight Mirage arc in Friends at the Table, which I also am listening to right now, and which does set up a societal Utopia but goes MUCH HARDER in threatening its demise.)
And then I hit the end of the book and I almost started crying in my work cafeteria, and I'm still not entirely sure I can put into words why.
Record of a Spaceborn Few is the third book in the loosely-connected Wayfarers series, set in a far future where several different human cultures have survived to mingle with a vast multi-species intergalactic community. The first book is a moderately fun episodic narrative of Small Crew Of Humans And Aliens Has Adventures In Space; the second serves as an examination of AI and artificial personhood and is extremely good.
This third book, for the first time, does a deep delve into an all-human communities in this imagined future -- the Exodans, the last group to leave a destroyed Earth, who survived by building massive generation ships and setting out in search of an unknown future and landing place.
Now the Exodans have been granted a permanent patch of space round a sun and a space in the Galactic Commons, and for several generations the ships haven't searched anymore. New goods, technologies, and media are arriving from the outside world that couldn't be created within the closed atmosphere of the generation ships. Some people are leaving to live planetside; others, generally humans from the broader post-Earth human diaspora, are coming to the ships out of some kind of sense of Exodan society as a human cultural home. Exodan culture -- a post-capitalist society carefully designed to allow large numbers of people to live in a closed sphere in balance and stability -- is in flux.
The book follows several members of that society, part of the same broad community but relatively distant from each other, going about their daily lives: a working mother, a disaffected teenager, a caretaker who processes the dead, an immigrant from galactic space, an elderly archivist hosting an alien academic guest. The first half of the book is about slowly getting to know these people and their context; in the second half, they all react to a small tragedy that highlights the ways in which Exodan culture is changing, and the ways it can survive.
Record of a Spaceborn Few is, at heart, a Utopian narrative -- a flawed Utopia, a Utopia in transition or in decline, but nonetheless a Utopia that posits that humans have the capability to build a functional society, that social problems can be solved to collective benefit, and that something worth having can come out of potentially-catastrophic change. If this book has a thesis, it's that loss doesn't have to be only tragedy; it can also be transformation.
And I guess that's why I found myself trying desperately to pretend I wasn't tearing up in a public cafeteria, on a day on a week in a year when. You know.
(And how little science fiction I read that offers a sense of hope that I find believable and relevant; how few Utopias of any kind! Recommend me some, please, if you can think of any; the only thing comparable that's coming to mind right now is the Twilight Mirage arc in Friends at the Table, which I also am listening to right now, and which does set up a societal Utopia but goes MUCH HARDER in threatening its demise.)
