BOOK REVIEW: The Galaxy and the Ground Within (Wayfarers, #4) by Becky Chambers

The Galaxy and The Ground Within is the fourth entry in the Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers, a quirky collection of loosely connected stories of life about an interstellar, multifarious civilization where humans are just one among a large number of space-faring species. The Wayfarers series won the Hugo award for Best Series in 2019 for Becky Chambers. 

The previous books in the series are The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (2014); A Closed and Common Orbit (2016); and Record of a Spaceborn Few (2018). The Galaxy and The Ground Within was published in 2021. The books are all similar yet also very different, with nebulous connections between the individual entries. Basically what they all share is a vibe, which a significant fraction of readers find admirable and appealing. I suppose they can be classified as “space opera” because the formal definition of the term is “an adventure science-fiction story” and there are aliens, spaceships and conflict in all of the Wayfarer books. 

However what sets the Wayfarers books apart is that the “narrative tension” or conflict in these books is often at a much lower scale/volume than what one typically sees in a space opera novel. This "lack" of action sometimes leads to complaints that “nothing happens” in these books but I disagree. Instead, most of the action is more individualized and impacts a small number of characters.

For example, in The Galaxy and The Ground Within a horrible accident happens that results in the destruction of multiple satellites over a planet which is usually a busy way station for travelers (called the Five-Hop One Stop) across the galaxy. The result is that a handful of aliens have their travel plans disrupted and are forced to interact with each other and the manager of the way station for an extended period of time. It’s basically the interstellar equivalent of the famous Icelandic volcanic eruption that disrupted inter-Atlantic travel several years ago, leaving travelers stranded in various airports. For the people involved it’s a big deal, of course, but for an uninvolved observer it is inconsequential.

What Chambers does is try to make us care about what happens by getting us to know more about the aliens (in this Wayfarers book there are no speaking characters that are human) while slowly revealing to us the impact of the travel delay on their lives. Chambers incorporates diversity in multiple ways into her books. In some of the earlier books, there was diversity in the kind of intelligence (artificial or computer-based intelligence versus biological) was a theme. In in The Galaxy and The Ground Within there is a prominent non-binary character and multiple characters perform their gender in a way that would surprise humans by their fluidity (like "male" characters either getting pregnant or having borne offspring).

Overall, I liked this book about as much as the other books in the series but I must admit that they are a specialized, acquired taste for the vast majority of science fiction fans who are used to their space opera in the mode of Star Trek or Star Wars or The Expanse (that is, action-packed, thrill rides with weapons, aliens, discovery and suspense). That said, there are still some low-key levels of enjoyment from reading the Wayfarers books and if you have read the others, you will most likely enjoy The Galaxy and The Ground Within too.

Title: The Galaxy and the Ground Within.
Author: Becky Chambers .
Format: Hardcover.
Length: 325 pages.
Publisher: Harper Voyager.
Date Published: April 20, 2021.
Date Read: September 8, 2021.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★☆  (4.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.67/4.0).

PLOT: B+.
IMAGERY: A.
IMPACT: A-.
WRITING: A-.

BOOK REVIEW: Record of a Spaceborn Few (Wayfarers, #3) by Becky Chambers

Record of a Spaceborn Few is the third entry in a loosely connected set of books written by Becky Chambers called the Wayfarers series. It is set in a Universe where many generations before humans have been forced to abandon Earth and conducted an exodus into space on 32 generation ships formed from the metals and materials of their cities. Eventually the Exodan Fleet made it to a part of space where they met and were allowed entry into a thriving community of alien lifeforms called the Galactic Commons.

The Wayfarers stories began with A Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet in 2016 and continued with A Closed and Common Orbit in 2017. Although I was not very enamored of the first book, it definitely had a lot of award-worthy buzz for a debut novel and even now has an average Goodreads rating well above 4.0 out of more than 40k ratings, which is impressive. The structure of that book was off-putting to me in that Chambers uses the now-familiar George R.R. Martin structure of each subsequent chapter being named for and centered around different characters. In A Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet, the characters are the 7 members of the crew of a ship, and Chambers goes into details about their backgrounds and home planet. However, I simply didn't care much about any of the characters and there's very little plot development, but the universe the book is set in was compelling enough to convince me to read the sequel. A Closed and Common Orbit has less than the half the number of ratings of its predecessor but an even higher average rating, with good reason. (It was also on the short list for the 2017 Hugo award for Best Novel.)

In Record of a Spaceborn Few the story is centered firmly in the Exodan Fleet with passing references to the numerous planets that humans have colonized throughout the galaxy instead of focusing on one ship and its crew like in the first book. (Although to be fair, by going over the backstory of the crew, we did learrn more about more of the other planets in the Wayfarers universe than we do in this book.) The plot of A Closed and Common Orbit was much more story-focused, as it dealt with a continuation of the story of one of the crew members from the first book and has a fascinating focus on the cultural norms of a society filled with multiple, variegated forms of alien life.

In the third entry in the Wayfarers series, Chambers has the good sense to make the civilization and culture of the Exodan Fleet the central aspect of the story, more as it was in Book 2. This time she does this by focusing on several characters who play specific roles: a disaffected teenager who wants to rebel against Exodan society; an alien amateur anthropologist who is visiting the ship the story is centered around and a lesbian librarian who is shepherding her around; a clueless human "Grounder" who leaves his planet to visit the Fleet to make his fortune; a single parent with two kids and who yearns for a better life; a spiritual leader who actually does find a hooker with a heart of gold. It is an eclectic mix, and this feature is one of the great strengths of the novel. The main characters and side characters are diverse in age, gender, physical ability, sexual orientation and other factors.

However I still found Record of a Spaceborn Few to be a slow, somewhat forced read for me. It started off very slowly, and I thought it would become a repeat of the first book where I hated all the characters but instead what happened is that all of the characters grew on me and I was anxious and interested in what happens to them. It's clear that plot is not really what Chambers is interested in, as much more of the focus is on the contours of the character's lives. Happily, Chambers obliges with codas for most of the characters at the end of the book which tell you what happens to them six months to two years after the main events of the central plot are resolved. This allows the reader to end the book on a hopeful and satisfied note.

Title: Record of a Spaceborn Few (Wayfarers, #3).
Author: Becky Chambers.
Paperback: 359 pages.
Publisher: Orbit.
Date Published: July 24, 2018.
Date Read: October 13, 2018.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★½☆  (3.5/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.67/4.0).

PLOT: B+.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A-.
WRITING: A.

BOOK REVIEW: A Closed And Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

 A Closed and Common Orbit was nominated for the 2017 Hugo award for Best Novel (losing to N.K. Jemisin's The Obelisk Gate). It is the second book in the Wayfarers sequence, following 2014's The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.  The two are clearly related, existing in a similar universe but they have very few characters in common so it is difficult to consider the book a direct sequel; to me the two books feel very different.  For  example, I was mostly unimpressed with  The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and thought it was overly cute and was put off by what I felt was its overuse of alien cultures and creatures in a voyeuristic way. I was much more engaged with the characters and story told in  A Closed and Common Orbit.

This second book reduces the set of characters that the story  told in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is focused on to basically two: Sidra and Jane 23. Sidra is the artificial intelligence (AI) that makes an entrance at the end of the first book. She has been placed into a humanoid body and has to get used to having the number of inputs reduced so dramatically from several dozen on a standard spaceship to the five (sight, sound, smell, taste and touch) commonly associated with sapients.

Sidra is taken in by Pepper (and her friend/partner) Blue after she decides to leave the Wayfarer spaceship from Book 1 and go live at Point Coriol, a multi-species space port, with them.

The main plot in Book 2 involves Sidra trying to acclimate herself to her new situation of an intelligence that was intended to run and manage a ship full of people and finds herself trapped in a single human body. The other thread of the plot is the story of Jane 23, a very young girl whom we discover is working in a factory to fix up scrapped electronic parts with dozens (or hundreds?) of other girls like her whom we eventually realize are probably clones who are being horribly exploited as cheap, dispensable labor. 

The structure of the story in  A Closed and Common Orbit is alternating chapters featuring Sidra's story followed by Jane 23's story. It is a very compelling device. Oftentimes when this is used (I'm looking at your George R.R. Martin and James S.A. Corey!) with several characters one finds that some of the characters' stories one is much less interested tha others, so when one sees the character name at the head of the chapter one groans or squeals, deending on one's interest. With just two characters I found myself equally interested in both stories, so I was always engaged in the book.

There are also several supporting characters, such as Owl (an AI that Jane 23 comes to live with and consider part of her family), Tak (a friendly alien that Sidra becomes close to in Port Coriol) and Pepper and Blue, the people that Sidra lives with and who help keep her secret that she's an escaped AI living in a humanoid body (which is considered a very serious breach of law and culture).

The story raises a number of really hard questions about how biological life forms should treat artificial intelligence (silicon-based life forms?). It is also a suspenseful story of survival (Jane 23 is a very sheltered ten  years old when she sets off on her own i.e. escapes her enslavement). One common theme from the first book which appears in this one is the diversity of alien life and the live-and-let-live ethos of a multi-species civilization. In the first book I felt like there was a bewildering number of different species that the author included to primarily titillate the reader. However in the second book I think the inclusion of alien characteristics and their practices was more subtly incorporated into the story this time and did not distract from the two main stories,  both of which were quite compelling.

I don't want to discuss the actual plot of the book. But one clear strength of Book 2 is that there are multiple story arcs to engage the reader while in the first book the story  seemed like more of a travelogue as we were exposed to various members of the crew of the spaceship and not much actually happened. That is definitely not the case in  A Closed and Common Orbit.

Solid 4.5 stars on the Goodreads scale.

Title: A Closed and Common Orbit (Wayfarers, #2).
Author: Becky Chambers.
Paperback: 365 pages.
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton.
Date Published: October 20, 2016.
Date Read: October 1, 2017.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★ (4.5/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.67/4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: B+.
WRITING: A.