(no subject)

[skygiants]

For 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.)

Comments

[happydork]

I love this book so fucking much. It's just so thoughtful and careful and filled to the brim with empathy, and the way Chambers uses the minutiae of individual experiences to look deep into collective and cultural changes blows my mind, and, just, such a good book, I cried too.

[skygiants]

I almost never cry at books! Usually it takes a full orchestra and a really emotionally manipulative musical cue! HOW DID YOU GET ME THIS GOOD WITH YOUR CALM SLICE-OF-LIFE EMPATHY, BECKY CHAMBERS. WHAT'S YOUR WITCHCRAFT.

[raven]

YES. All of this. It's a beautiful book.

[skygiants]

I picked it up like "set expectations low, it's never gonna be as good as Closed and Common Orbit" and LITTLE DID I KNOW.

[happydork]

Hi friend, delighted to see the two comment threads so far on this post are you and me flailing happily. <3

[affreca]

This helps me decide what to read next.

[skygiants]

I'm glad I could help with that because for me 'deciding what to read next' is a constant trial and agony!

[aamcnamara]

I scrolled down DW, read the first couple of sentences of this post, looked at half-read copy of Record of a Spaceborn Few next to me, and picked it up again. Now I have finished it.

...did not cry at the ending but, yeah, she is doing a thing there, and it is a good and necessary thing, and I do have more feelings about the book than I expected given its start. Also some existential feelings about my life.

I wonder if there will be more books in the series? Somehow I had gotten the impression it was a trilogy but structurally it...doesn't.

(Is it weird that I take more professional umbrage at this version of archivists than I do with Archivist Wasp, because Archivist Wasp is totally divorced from actual archives and this is clooooose but no cigar although some of the ethical engagements and questions ring similarly?)

Have you read Woman on the Edge of Time? It's not...hmm, it's not hopeful exactly but it's engaged with the work of creating a better world in a way I found useful. And it has some issues with race and ethnicity (and to a lesser extent, gender) to my reading, but a lot less than one might expect of a work of feminist utopian SF published in 1976.

[skygiants]

I DID NOT EXPECT to cry! Much of the book feels like an academic exercise and yet here I was and here I am.

I had also gotten the impression of trilogy but who knows -- I mean, the trilogy has about as much structure as any of the books themselves do, which is really not particularly much. 'Plot arc' is not so much what Becky Chambers does.

(lol, I don't think that's strange, but grateful for scraps that I am, I was just pleased by the fact that there was a paragraph engaging with the challenges of cataloging and metadata. A bunt, sure, but at least the bat connected with the ball!)

I have not read Woman on the Edge of Time! I'm not sure I know anything about it, actually, except that it's a Classic of some sort. Thanks for the rec; I'll add it to my list.

[landingtree]

I read A Closed and Common Orbit two days ago on a plane, because someone else had added it to my shared kindle account. Books also don't tend to make me cry. I cried. (While saying internally "Owl!" in various tones of voice). Thank you for telling me there's a next one!

But I can't really think of anything similar. (Never read a less plotful space opera. If someone else had written it, there would have been so much more event, and it wouldn't be better...) I have been finding some things in Ruthanna Emrys' Winter Tide useful re. sense of doom, but I can imagine it feeling the opposite as well. Utopia is not what that is doing.

[skygiants]

I loved A Closed and Common Orbit ... I think probably more than I actually liked this book, to be honest, for most of the time that I was reading it. But something about this book, in particular, hit me a very certain way.

(But A Closed and Common Orbit has REAMS of plot in comparison with Record of a Spaceborn Few.)

[genarti]

Oh wow, this sounds lovely. I haven't read any of this series yet, but I've been meaning to, and clearly I really should.

I feel like I should be able to think of other utopian narratives, maybe flawed but built on a confidently asserted hope; hope and kindness are things I value so much in fiction. But I keep failing to think of any. I'll keep thinking. There must be more.

[skygiants]

You should for sure read the whole series, or at least the last two, but this book absolutely in particular.

[scribe]

I'm not sure I really have anything to add here, except that I also read this recently and am still struck deeply by it in a way I have trouble articulating. <3

[skygiants]

Something about that scene at the end with Kip in the museum -- that, and the parable about the Harmagians disturbing their environment, and the repeated question, what do we have to offer? All of that, I keep thinking about.

[schneefink]

This was such an odd book. I didn't expect a lot of plot, but even with that I was surprised how little there was. I was also somewhat disappointed that all the story threads seemed to be so separate. There was a lot of emphasis on the importance of having somewhere or someones you feel connected to, but there were fewer connections than I expected.
That said, I did enjoy it, and the atmosphere was very nice.

[skygiants]

I am still amazed she got away with having THAT LITTLE plot in a book published by a mainstream house. It's a book that absolutely resists any conventional kind of narrative impulse, and is clearly doing so quite deliberately.

[shark_hat]

Recent-ishly, Jo Walton's Thessaly trilogy "did" utopia- I've only read the first one, The Just City (I love the themes Walton writes about, and her writing on a sentence level, but somehow I bounce off some of her actual books).

Oh, Always Coming Home! It's not recent but it's so humane.

[skygiants]

I heard about the Thessaly trilogy and have been vaguely meaning to read it, though I get the sense that its exploration of Utopian themes is pretty significantly different than this one ...

Always Coming Home is one of the Le Guins I haven't read and I absolutely should, thank you!

[allchildren]

Always Coming Home is even less plotty than Record of a Spaceborn Few. By, like, a lot. There's really not a narrative or cast at all-- and also I never finished it, so I should get back to it. It is lovely.

I can't currently think of anyone more Chambersy than Le Guin (you've read The Dispossessed, right?!) and Leckie, but I am interested that you considered this a utopian narrative. It didn't feel that way to me, thought I understand what you're saying. My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2266248240?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1

BTW, was just announced a few days ago that she is collaborating with Rivers Solomon (best known for a decidedly non-utopian generation ship society), Yoon Ha Lee (you can say better than I), and SL Huang (not familiar) on a serial novel: https://www.serialbox.com/serials/vela :O !

[skygiants]

I mean, it may say something for how low my standards are for utopias these days -- is there a general conception that it's possible to build a society that is both effective and egalitarian? UTOPIA! sign me up for that space communism.

(I think the thing that really felt Utopian to me, honestly -- as in the sense of an ideal society that does not exist and has not yet existed, but could, hypothetically -- was the design of the ships so that everybody has equal access to windows to see the stars.)

...man, I'm trying to imagine what a serial novel written by that crew all together would look like and I'm drawing a giant blank with the word SPACE in it. Like, technically the subject matter is overlapping but the writing tone is SO DIFFERENT. (I read An Unkindness of Ghosts a few months ago and have been meaning to write it up, but my feelings on it were complicated and so I have not gotten around to it.)

[allchildren]

Glancing at my GR review reminds me - really, the utopian narrative ROASF most evokes for me is Star Trek. I know you’ve watched DS9, which is itself hugely invested in picking apart TNG’s utopia (Sisko’s “saint in paradise” speech is like Luther nailing theses to Gene Roddenberry’s door). Have you watched much/all of TNG?

[hippogriff13]

Vonda McIntyre's 1970's(?) novel "Of Mist and Grass and Sand" is set in what the author apparently intends to be a sort of post-industrial agrarian utopia. Personally I wasn't that wild about the idea of treating medical problems by being bitten by snakes with genetically-engineered-to-be-curative venom. (Handling this is what the protagonist does for a living.) But the book is considered a feminist SF classic, or at least used to be.

I thought of this mostly because the setting is somewhat similar to that of the future-utopian-society segments of Marge Piercy's "Woman on the Edge of Time," which was mentioned above. (I think "Woman on the Edge of Time" was written only a few years later than "Of Mist and Grass and Sand.") But Piercy's book is about a woman who literally slips back and forth between her original rather gritty, working-class (then) present-day existence and a much more egalitarian utopian future which she for a while believes is some sort of hallucination. (I think she's experienced mental health issues in the past, although I read the book literally decades ago, so I can't be certain.) So the overall feel of the two books isn't particularly similar, even though the future-utopia aspects have a fair amount in common.

"Whileaway" (I think that's the title), the original short-story version of what eventually became Joanna Russ' novel "The Female Man" (also from the '70's, I think) is also set in what the protagonist and her circle regard as a fairly utopian (all-female) society. But the short story is set at the moment when the long-lost all-female colony has just been rediscovered by a ship from the still-condescendingly-patriarchal mainstream human spacefaring society, centuries(?) after all the men on Whileaway (the colony) died of some gender-specific epidemic and the women coped by desperately coming up with some high-tech way to reproduce without using sperm. So their utopia is about to end, or society as they know it is going to undergo some fairly radical changes, at the very least. (Even if they attempt to resist rejoining the mainstream, or to restrict contact with it, this major new development will inevitably introduce significant new sociopolitical stresses into their way of life.)

SF with what appear to be intended to be at least somewhat utopian settings seems to have been more of a trend in the 1970's (and '80's?) than has been the case more recently, at least when it comes to female-centric stories. Maybe the sudden 1960's/'70's breakdown in traditional ideas of what the world was supposed to be like, especially in terms of gender relationships, just made it easier to come up with more non-ironically ideal hypothetical societies, or to be more hopeful that alternate forms of social organization could actually work out in some non-oppressive way. (It's probably not exactly a coincidence that the more recent YA obsession with various types of dystopias came along after several decades' worth of post-1960's and '70's political change had failed to improve society as much across the board as the pro-change people of that era had hoped.) I'm not sure how, or whether, this relates to Becky Chambers' "Record of a Spaceborn Few," which I haven't read yet.

[izilen]

Oh, this is a nice way to put it! I personally was more affected by A Closed and Common Orbit, but still A Record of a Spaceborn Few was a very appealing academic exercise to me, and somehow very soothing. I find Becky Chambers soothing, and I hope to read more by her.

[skygiants]

I think A Closed and Common Orbit is maybe the BEST one and certainly the one that is ... most like a book? In having a plot, with narrative, and character arcs, and I do like those things and as a result I think I like it best. But Record of a Spaceborn Few came from behind and hit me over the head with some feelings that I did not expect.