Hugo Award Nominees: Record of a Spaceborn Few (novel) and Wayfarers (Series) by Becky Chambers

Becky Chambers' first novel, The Long Way to A Small Angry Planet, was a break-out hit for self-publishing. Fans loved it for its character-centred storytelling, its relatively optimistic vision of a future society with no hint of any kind of sex-based prejudice, and perhaps because it is a rare example, these days, of a novel featuring interstellar spaceships which is not primarily about war. Detractors (few but vocal) found it a small step from Chamber's earlier Farscape fan fiction, complaining about its lightweight and episodic plotting, stereotypical and not very unhuman aliens, and merely workmanlike prose.  If Chambers had been the hack writer they supposed,  she would have continued the story of the good ship Wayfarer; but in fact her next novel,  the Hugo-nominated A Closed and Common Orbit, revolves around two minor characters from the first, one of whom appeared only in the final pages. This book came in for intense criticism from the 2017 Shadow Clarke Jury, which IMHO was largely unfair and often applied more to Long Way than to ACACO, which featured a much more focused plot with a powerful emotional payoff, and did real SF work in imagining the perspective of its AI co-protagonist.

Her third novel, once again, has a passing connection to the first. One of the viewpoint characters. Tessa, is the sister of the Wayfarer's captain, Ashby, and near the start receives a message from him letting her know that he survived the events of Long Way; that's the last we hear of any members of the old crew. Record of a Spaceborn Few is set on the Exodus Fleet, one of the central planks of Chamber's world-building. The backstory is that the fleet was constructed by the last survivors of Earth, escaping in the nick of time as ecological and climate catastrophes render the planet uninhabitable. This is a scientifically illiterate and grotesquely irresponsible premise, but I'll write about that some other time; for the moment let's go with it. Originally, the 32 "homesteader" ships carried the majority of surviving humanity (apparently a few million) out of the Solar system with no particular destination in mind, leaving behind a sparse population in colonies on Mars and the outer planets. Centuries on, post-contact with the Galactic Commons, the fleet orbits an unwanted star, retrofitted with GC tech including artificial gravity and faster-than-light drives. A steady stream of Exodans emigrate for a life in the wider GC, or to start new colonies.

If anyone still thinks Chambers lacks ambition as a writer, Record should put doubts to rest. She is attempting something remarkable here, and in the process has taken all the rules about commercial writing that I suppose they teach at Clarion and elsewhere and torn them into tiny little pieces and blown them away on the wind. The book has been widely criticised as plotless and indeed it makes Long Way look positively byzantine. I was well past the half-way mark when I realised that essentially nothing had happened yet. OK, in the prologue the homesteader Oxomoco is wrecked just off-screen, an accident than kills tens of thousands. But attentive Chambers fans already know about this, since the accident is mentioned as recent past history in Long Way. I would not have finished this book if I hadn't been reading it for the award, and that would have been a big mistake.

The novel consists of brief slice-of-life chapters following five viewpoint characters, who interact only tangentially with each other. Interleaved are blogposts by a sixth character, Ghuh'loloan Mok Chupt, a member of the semi-aquatic Harmagian species on an ethnographic research trip to the Exodus Fleet; in many ways these are the most interesting sections. Unlike the characters in the earlier novels, most of whom are extroverts, outliers in their society and uprooted from their past, the Exodan characters here are introverts, at home, doing what they're expected to do by their society: Tessa is a mother stressing about her kids and her cranky dad; Kip, a teenager kicking at his constraints;  and two who are very specific to Exodan society: Eyas is a caretaker, responsible for recycling the dead: in a closed ecosystem, an essential and honoured task, but one that can make social interaction awkward. Isabel is an archivist, responsible not only for maintaining and writing the records in a society which takes care to remember every Exodan since the start of the voyage, but also for leading the ceremonies that welcome each new child and memorialise each death. In this atheist society, she is the nearest thing to a priest. The last human character, Sawyer, is the odd one out: although his distant ancestors were Exodans he was born on a planet in the GC, and finding himself at a loose end, comes to the fleet to make a new home. Since he is also an introvert and arrives knowing no-one, he doesn't make much of a fist of it.  What I'm trying to say here is that as well as lacking plot, the characters don't really grab you in the way Chambers fans might have expected.

So what is she up to? The clue is in the title, and the titles of each section of the novel, taken from Exodan ritual: 

"From the beginning | We have wandered | To this day, we wander still | But for all our travels | We are not lost | We fly with courage | And will undying" 

The focus is first-person plural: this is a novel about a society, not individuals. As in a traditional utopia, Ghuh'lolan and Sawyer arrive and explore a world as strange to them as it is to us. The Exodans left behind on Earth the old nations, religions, customs, and languages. Just as importantly as building their ships, they built a new society designed to sustain itself indefinitely in resourceless interstellar space.  In many ways it is idealistic: egalitarian, compassionate, untroubled by any outcast group who could be scapegoated when things go wrong. Chambers is unashamed to use Ghuh'lolan as an excuse to infodump extensively: ship architecture, the economy (universal right to necessities, supplemented by barter), emigration, history, agriculture—there's a sentence that could have been lifted from Edward Bellamy or William Morris:

Farmers made themselves busy in the walkways between, some harvesting, some testing the soil, some planting new seedlings.

Ghuh'lolan also ruminates extensively on the similarities and differences between humans, harmagians, and the other aliens in the GC. Perhaps this is pushback against the charge that Chambers' aliens are just American liberals in masks. Chambers certainly loves to explore different reproductive strategies, and none of her aliens can quite get their head around long-term mammalian nurturing, but it's true that such differences don't affect
inter-species empathy nearly enough to be plausible.

To Ghuh'lolan and, in many ways, to us, the Exodans are impoverished. Make do and mend, or at least recycle, is their creed. Their food is nutritious but monotonous and only just enough: Kip is scandalised by a foreign drama in which characters leave food on their plates.   This is a utopia under stress, and a major theme is the impact of a richer, rougher, more diverse, and vastly larger society on an isolated, traditional community. A lot of the novel shows us their many weaknesses: they were saved by the charity of the Galactic Commons, and largely live thanks to rescripts from relatives working in the wider world. In return they treat aliens with suspicion and sometimes prejudice or obsequiousness. Sawyer is treated officially as a native, but he has no idea how to live on the fleet and in practice is seen as a foreigner.  We gradually see how appallingly isolated he is, a man with no family or friends and hardly even an acquaintance. His ignorance, and Exodan carelessness, especially from the low-lifes he falls in with, eventually produce the one real event of the novel. It's a low point, and recounted without affect, but afterwards, as the ripples spread out, the novel finally grabbed me. We start to see the inner strength of Exodan society. Lessons are learned, long-postponed decisions are made. Tessa's family join the exodus from the Exodus Fleet, helping to pioneer a new colony world...but they remain Exodans through and through. Kip makes it to a planet at the heart of the Galactic Commons, and has his eyes opened:

To say ‘I’ve never seen anything like this’ was the same as saying ‘I got up today’.

 Near the start of the book, Isabel leads a naming-day ceremony for a new baby. We read it as ethnographers, at once soaking up the backstory recited in the ritual, and a little bored by the ponderous ceremony.  At the end, years after the main events, another baby is named, and Isabel recites the exact same words. But now we hear them as the Exodans do. We see that in the face of everything, the Fleet survives. I wanted to cry. I wanted to cheer.  It's a remarkable trick that Chambers has pulled off.