“From the ground, we stand. From our ships, we live. By the stars, we hope.”
Becky Chambers’s Hugo Award nominee for Best Novel may be the third book in the Wayfarers series, but I think it works extremely well as a standalone book too.
Hundreds of years ago, humanity used up the last of the worn-out Earth’s resources to make thirty-two city-sized ships and escaped to the stars. The trip took centuries, but the Exodus Fleet was accepted (eventually) into the Galactic Commons and given their own star to orbit.
Even though humans are now able to live on other planets, hundreds of thousands of Exodans still remain on the Fleet, choosing to live where their families have lived for generations with no need for things like weather, or animals, or air that isn’t separated from space by a few layers of metal.
That covers the first two books. Record of a Spaceborn Few actually starts where Book One ended, with the explosive decompression of a homestead ship – the Oxomoco – causing the deaths of more than forty thousand people onboard. I think the cause was a space-shuttle crash, but it’s never actually made all that clear. The destruction of the Oxomoco is the catalyst for change in the lives of the six main characters who’s viewpoints tell the story, but other than that it’s actually the least important part of the book.
This novel has generation spaceships, alien lifeforms, and takes place entirely in a different solar system. And it most definitely is not a sci-fi action/adventure. You need to understand that right away if you’re thinking about reading this book; there’s not even one instance of someone firing a laser in the entire story. The author’s storytelling style is a lot more nuanced than that.
The chapters jump viewpoints between several different characters. There’s Tessa (hardworking cargo worker and mother of two), Isabel (dedicated archivist), Eyas (caretaker: think funeral director, although the reality is a lot more complicated), Kip (disaffected teenager desperate to leave his boring family and actually do something with his life. So basically a normal teenager), Ghuh’loloan (alien writing a series of essays about the modern-day Exodus Fleet) and Sawyer (twenty-something who grew up on a planet but now thinks immigrating to the Fleet may give his life something more). Each one of these characters is a jewel-like example of a perfectly believable individual, all with their own background, motivations, and reasons for being happy (or mostly so)(or in Kip’s case, not at all).
And fully a third of the book goes by before you run into anything that resembles a novel-sized plot.
And you know what? It totally works for me. The book immerses you in the lives of these characters, and by proxy in all the intricacies of life aboard a spaceship. And it has all the details I adore, the ones that show the author has really thought about all the ways things would work in an extra-planetary environment.
Rooms on the homestead ship are hexagons, surrounded by more to make a hexagon home, surrounded by more to make a hexagon neighborhood, and so on and so on until you have have the gigantic hexagon deck that makes one-sixth of the livable space aboard the ship. And with everything designed to be spun for gravity (ships were built before anti-grav), you can only see the stars from windows set in the floor.
What else? Well, if you throw away something in the space between the stars then there’s no way to get a replacement, so everything onboard a generational ship is recyclable. Must be recyclable. And yes, that includes humans. And here, brutal necessity has evolved into ceremony, so someone like Eyas who processes the dead to be turned into fertilizer for the many onboard gardens is treated with an incredible amount of love and respect. The services for the dead are quite beautiful; I actually did get teary-eyed at one point. You really get a sense how much emotion people put into the idea of continuing to be part of the ship’s life even after they’re gone (so you have a better grasp of just how bad it is when you’re dealing with the logistics of forty-thousand casualties in what’s usually a closed environment.)
“Make sure people remember that a closed system is still a closed system even when you can’t see the edges.”
Ghuh’loloan’s essays deliver exposition about some of the smaller details (and how they relate to the larger universe), but for the most part each chapter is a slice-of-life story, with most of the main characters being only tangentially related to the others. So instead of space battles you get Isabel on a date night with her wife, or Tessa picking up her daughter from a zero-gee playground. Sawyer struggles with how to get people to see him as a resident of the homestead ship Asteria and not just a tourist, while Kip deals with the absolute worst nightmarish situation a teenager can imagine: the conversation where his parents won’t shut up about how healthy and normal it is for a teenage boy to want to have sex. And Eyas gives us a glimpse into the modern convenience of setting up a time and place to have sex with a skilled professional, someone who won’t see her as the caretaker when great grandma so-and-so shuffled off this mortal coil.
There are all sorts of prosaic issues, like in a system with more than one sun having to learn which sunrise marks the start of the day. There are shipboard classes for emigrants, with titles like “The Legal Do’s and Don’ts of Engine Upgrades”, “Interspecies Sensitivity Training”, and “Those Aren’t Apples: Common Alien Foods You Need to Avoid”. And there are people like Sawyer want to belong to a close-knit group like the Exodans, while others like Kip think life would be so much better if he were anywhere else?
“What was better – a constant safeness that never grew and never changed, or a life of reaching, building, striving, even though you knew you’d never be completely satisfied?”
Many important questions are asked. Why is it that communities can show lots of sympathy for strangers, but only in the abstract? Can a community hold onto traditions and a way of life that’s important and still bring in new people and new ideas? And how do you deal with the fact that literally everything you do or don’t do as a species will have an unavoidable ripple effect on, well, everything else?
The gentle pacing and domestic themes mean this book probably won’t be for everyone. For me personally, I’m kicking myself that I didn’t have a chance to read A Closed and Common Orbit back when it was up for a Hugo Award in 2017. I think I may have to go back and read that and also A Long Way to a Short, Angry Planet so I can get a better idea of just how this whole Exodan community got here in the first place.