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Sep. 13th, 2021 01:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I'm not sure The Galaxy, and the Ground Within is my favorite Becky Chambers novel, or the one I think is her best -- that might still be A Closed and Common Orbit -- but I do think it is maybe the perfect example of the kind of storytelling she does, like, the peak (to date) of this particular kind of craft.
Normally when talking about a book I would start out by saying something like "the plot is", but that's of course the wrong way to talk about a Chambers book; Chambers books have stories, characters, and situations, but never plots. If you told me that a fairy with strong opinions about literature cursed Becky Chambers to fall asleep for a hundred years if she ever wrote a book with a plot in it, I would believe it.
Anyway, the situation of this book is that a temporary space infrastructure collapse has left a small group of travelers stuck together at a space B&B for a few days until the space highways are cleared and everyone can continue on their regularly scheduled journeys. The disaster is a mild one, as things go. The travelers are not really in any kind of life-threatening peril, and their biggest concern is the uncertainty and the delay, which looks likely to have different impacts for all of them: one of the characters is facing a painful interplanetary visa situation, another a time-sensitive reproductive decision, yet another is from a marginalized and displaced population and is about to find herself in the uncomfortable position of becoming a lone Representative of her Culture to a group of strangers who are trying their best to be polite but nonetheless have some very clear Preconceived Ideas.
(All of the characters are aliens, by the way, which is great for me and another example I think of Chambers progressing in confidence; A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet relied heavily on the presence of a Relatable Human Viewpoint Character as well as on a more conventional kind of found-family-in-space framing and was I think much weaker for it. It is simply very enjoyable to hang out for a while in a universe in which humans exist but do not need to be present or the center of attention all the time!)
Over the course of the time they're trapped together, the travelers talk, and exchange concerns and ideas, and recontextualize their own situations; in some cases become friends, and in other cases emphatically don't, and at the end of the book they all go their separate ways. The time they spend together doesn't fix any of the systemic problems in their lives or their universe. No one falls in love, no one gets married or adopted. All the same, the travelers do impact each others' lives, in ways both small and profound. I truly do love this. I love the way the book holds a collection of moments up to the light and says, hey, not every group of strangers needs to become a family for their interactions to matter to each other; these small transitory interactions matter too, more than anyone may know at the time that they happen.
What this book reminds me of more than anything else, actually, is Maeve Binchy's Evening Class. Obviously in that book people do fall in love, but it's still very much, like -- you live your life, and you meet strangers and make small choices, and don't know what's going to end up being meaningful to you until after it happens. It is a kind of story I do like very much and I am glad that sff publishers are now beginning to accept the fact that you can also tell it with spaceships.
Normally when talking about a book I would start out by saying something like "the plot is", but that's of course the wrong way to talk about a Chambers book; Chambers books have stories, characters, and situations, but never plots. If you told me that a fairy with strong opinions about literature cursed Becky Chambers to fall asleep for a hundred years if she ever wrote a book with a plot in it, I would believe it.
Anyway, the situation of this book is that a temporary space infrastructure collapse has left a small group of travelers stuck together at a space B&B for a few days until the space highways are cleared and everyone can continue on their regularly scheduled journeys. The disaster is a mild one, as things go. The travelers are not really in any kind of life-threatening peril, and their biggest concern is the uncertainty and the delay, which looks likely to have different impacts for all of them: one of the characters is facing a painful interplanetary visa situation, another a time-sensitive reproductive decision, yet another is from a marginalized and displaced population and is about to find herself in the uncomfortable position of becoming a lone Representative of her Culture to a group of strangers who are trying their best to be polite but nonetheless have some very clear Preconceived Ideas.
(All of the characters are aliens, by the way, which is great for me and another example I think of Chambers progressing in confidence; A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet relied heavily on the presence of a Relatable Human Viewpoint Character as well as on a more conventional kind of found-family-in-space framing and was I think much weaker for it. It is simply very enjoyable to hang out for a while in a universe in which humans exist but do not need to be present or the center of attention all the time!)
Over the course of the time they're trapped together, the travelers talk, and exchange concerns and ideas, and recontextualize their own situations; in some cases become friends, and in other cases emphatically don't, and at the end of the book they all go their separate ways. The time they spend together doesn't fix any of the systemic problems in their lives or their universe. No one falls in love, no one gets married or adopted. All the same, the travelers do impact each others' lives, in ways both small and profound. I truly do love this. I love the way the book holds a collection of moments up to the light and says, hey, not every group of strangers needs to become a family for their interactions to matter to each other; these small transitory interactions matter too, more than anyone may know at the time that they happen.
What this book reminds me of more than anything else, actually, is Maeve Binchy's Evening Class. Obviously in that book people do fall in love, but it's still very much, like -- you live your life, and you meet strangers and make small choices, and don't know what's going to end up being meaningful to you until after it happens. It is a kind of story I do like very much and I am glad that sff publishers are now beginning to accept the fact that you can also tell it with spaceships.
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Date: 2021-09-13 06:37 am (UTC)Thank you; this may be the first Becky Chambers I feel really impelled to read.
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Date: 2021-09-13 11:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-09-13 06:39 am (UTC)I must go look up this Evening Class book, now; I don't think I've read another novel like Galaxy, and I very much want to, even if it doesn't have spaceships.
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Date: 2021-09-13 11:51 pm (UTC)I love Evening Class -- it's essentially a collection of novelettes surrounding an adult ed Italian class in a lower-class Dublin neighborhood, and the ripple effects the connections made there have on the lives of various different people in the area; very much a novel of community-by-chance. I hope you enjoy it if you read it!
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Date: 2021-09-13 11:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-09-13 11:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-09-14 01:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-09-13 12:32 pm (UTC)I really loved the emotional and cultural conflicts in this one, how some people became friends and some left still fundamentally disagreeing each other, but everyone ultimately chose kindness in helping each other's lives be a little easier or for something small but significant go right for them. There are no complete fixes, but I felt like everyone's lives improved a little by the end, which was nice. Hopeful without being saccharine!
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Date: 2021-09-14 12:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-09-14 01:02 am (UTC)YES YES YES YES this exactly; I loved this book, and this is a lot of why.
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Date: 2021-09-16 01:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-09-16 02:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-09-14 09:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-09-16 01:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-09-22 01:31 pm (UTC)Yes. I do think that's a thing that Chambers does very well, and it's rare enough that I really appreciate it.
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Date: 2021-09-24 01:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-06 02:28 pm (UTC)I was also really grooving on it being an all aliens, no humans story, to the point that when the first human showed up, she was... really fucking weird. Like, DEF more alien than everyone I'd been spending the whole book with!