At last, the boring little rock that spun around the drab little sun was given a use: that of an anchor between the places people actually wanted to visit.
The planet Gora is lifeless, airless, and widely considered to be completely useless…except that it happens to be right between five populated systems, conveniently located next to the entry points of several wormholes. The wormhole hub has a Transit Authority responsible for coordinating the interstellar traffic; an hours-long wait for your departure time is both annoying and inevitable. So Gora took on a new identity as “rest stop”, and the planet was soon covered in habitat domes with every type of lodging, service, and pleasant distraction you could want.
There were hotels, tech swaps, restaurants, repair shops, grocery vendors, sim vendors, kick vendors, smash vendors, gardens, tet houses, and swimming pools, each courting weary spacers in need of some real gravity and a brief change in scenery.
Three separate strangers from three entirely different species settle in for a few hours at the not-the-most-expensive-but-fairly-nice-anyway establishment known as the Five-Hop One-Stop. All of them have places to go, thing to do, very important plans that have to be put into motion. And all of those plans get thrown out of the window when every satellite in Gora’s sky crashes into each other and plummets in flaming wreckage to the ground.
The fourth (and possibly final?) book in Becky Chambers’s Hugo-nominated Wayfarer’s series is similar to her book Record of a Spaceborn Few in that the technological disaster that puts the story in motion is actually the least important part of the story.
Thank you for your patience. We are all in this together.
We’ve had three books in which to see the universe of Chambers’s Wayfarer’s series, but a good part of that was from the human perspective. In this final book humans are mostly on the edges, with the aliens taking center stage. And these aliens are a lot more than just humans with different ears or blue skin; every alien race here has their own biology, their own culture, their own variations on gender, their own ways of “seeing” and “hearing”, and their own methods for making a comfortable habitat. Spaceship designs vary depending on both the needs of a species and their personal preferences: walls covered in expensive artwork, a garden devoted to growing crystals, furniture that morphs into whatever is needed at the moment, or threaded through with poles for a species that evolved in a tree-filled world and frequently suffers from a genetic condition that makes climbing a better idea than walking.
Chambers has also managed to include in one book a ton of information about each race’s planet (or lack thereof), and their governments, and their race’s history, their wars, their trade, and all the impossibly complex ways they interact with other races in the universe, sometimes in obviously unhealthy ways that feel heartbreakingly familiar.
“…when it came time to cast blame, the fact that we could point to people who weren’t even from our planet was deliciously convenient. It was their influence that had caused the fractures among us, you see, not centuries of our own inanity.”
Take this sprawling, universe-spanning setting, and then pull the focus, closer and closer, until almost every part of it takes place on one planet, inside one habitat dome, in what’s basically a tiny interstellar truck stop run by one mother and her (occasionally helpful, sometimes grumpy) teenage child.
The proprietor of The Five Hop-One Stop is Ouloo, a Laru: a race that looks something like a enthusiastic long-haired Joey the Lemur doll. Ouloo is determined to be the perfect host no matter what species walks through the door. In any other novel she’d probably come across as desperate, or condescending, or completely and embarrassingly wrong, like a tourist trying to communicate by speaking English very loudly and slowly. But almost improbably, Ouloo manages to get it right just about all of the time. Her attention to detail is nothing short of miraculous, right down to knowing which foods to stock, which fragrances won’t trigger an allergic reaction, and which color scheme won’t give Aeluons a headache.
The chapters jump between Ouloo and her child Tupo, Pei the Aeluon, Roveg the exiled Quelin, and Speaker, a member of the Akarak race that everyone has a mostly unfavorable opinion of but no one really knows much about. My favorite chapters had to be the ones with Pei. Aeluons communicate with color, and I found every bit of how they function in a hearing-world fascinating, and sometimes hilarious, like when she walks into the Five-Hop One-Stop traveler’s shop and got a little overwhelmed by all the multi-colored logos and wrapping.)
She felt as though she were staring directly into the sun, and that the sun really wanted her to buy something.
The ongoing disaster with, you know, every satellite in the sky in pieces and on fire, is playing havoc with everyone’s plans. The reader gradually finds out over the course of the book both what the plans are and why missing a deadline is a really big deal. But this is most definitely not a space-disaster adventure. This is about total strangers learning how someone from another race functions in a way that’s completely different from their own. It’s a slice-of-life story of conversations, of jokes, of picnics and snacks (one of the main ways Ouloo takes care of her trapped guests is making sure everyone has something to eat whenever they want it), of impromptu dance parties and a homemade “nature museum” made by a teenager who isn’t going to let the lack of natural life on Gora get in the way of documenting the planet’s natural history.
Most of the conversations are fun, like when the subject turns to humans and the entire group reacts in delighted horror at the entire concept of “cheese”. Some are a little heartrending, finding out why Roveg’s carapace has had all the inlaid jewels pried out, or why Speaker is desperate to get back to her sister, and what exactly it is that Pei’s been avoiding thinking about. And a few of the conversations get pretty uncomfortable, like when a little too much alcohol pares away all the politeness, and the truth, excuse me, the TRUTH, starts coming out instead.
“Do you not think that treating the galaxy as if it is something to be endlessly used will always, always end in tragedy? You think you’ve broken the cycle. You haven’t. You’re in a less violent period of the exact same cycle, and you don’t see it.”
In the current state of the world, and the current political climate, and an overwhelming number of dystopian movies, TV shows, and books to choose from, Becky Chambers’s unique brand of optimistic science fiction is a refreshing change. I had asked my sisters if they could come up with examples of other stories featuring the trope of wayfarers stuck together during a storm: the movie “Identity” came up, and also Neil Gaiman’s “Tavern at World’s End”. But oddly enough the example that feels the closest is “The Breakfast Club”, with five people stuck together and almost accidentally learning new ways of seeing the entire universe. There’s a little bit of the brain, the beauty, the jock, the rebel, and the recluse in each one of the characters, and there’s the same feeling of beautifully improbable friendships being made. The different though is that there’s a sense that things are really going to change after they’ve gone their separate ways, both for themselves and for quite a few people in the rest of the galaxy.