Review: Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers

Trade paperback, 359 pages
Published 2018
Acquired July 2018
Read August 2018

Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers

The first Wayfarers/Galactic Commons novel, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, didn't do much for me, as it was aimless and conflict-free, but I did end up enjoying the emotional journey of the second, A Closed and Common Orbit, so I picked up the third, Record of a Spaceborn Few. It's a lot like Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140, in that we follow a group of disparate protagonists as a way into seeing a futuristic society. Unlike New York 2140, though, the connections between strands are slight. A couple of the characters briefly meet during the novel, but there's no unifying plot.

It wants to be a book about the conflict between tradition and modernization: in the future, humanity has abandoned Earth for the Exodus Fleet, but once humanity discovers the Galactic Commons, more and more humans are leaving the Fleet for a more grounded life. So what's the point of the Exodus Fleet and Exodan tradition? But this was closer to the Long Way end of the Becky Chambers spectrum. The individual stories mostly left me cold, though every now and again there'd be a striking scene or moment, such as the Exodan funeral ceremony. I just feel like the characters and the themes don't have the depth needed to make Chambers's slice-of-life style storytelling work. Probably this will be my last Galactic Commons novel unless future installments are Hugo finalists again.