Record of a Spaceborn Few
Becky Chambers
London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2018
ISBN: 9-781473-647640
359 pp.
It is the future, at some unspecified date and humanity, in a much diminished state, has had to abandon the Earth. Some are managing to eke out a living on Mars and some on distant colonies but our main focus is on the fleet, the Exodus Fleet, which has been built with alien help and which now has reached its destination. Yet continuing to live on one of the ships of the fleet appeals to many, who have established communities there and a way of life that is familiar and comforting in what is clearly a dangerous universe
Living on a spaceship has its downside, of course. The people of the fleet do little other than support themselves through subsistence was of life. They produce almost no tradeable good and could not survive without outside intervention from time to time. Everything on the ship has to be reused and recycled and that includes the people themselves. When death comes, the otherwise ruinous loss of resources that might occur elsewhere is avoided by introducing what is left of the deceased into the production chains that are available. This involves a series of tasks in which appropriate levels of respect and dignity are deliberately obtained. It is necessary to mark the passing of people because otherwise they would be very little of them left to mourn (outside of the virtual world, that is). The need to recycle everything means there is no space for monuments or tangible places where memories can be fostered. There is an option for maintaining intangible memories but this is not the most popular part of a ship. What is the point of living like this? It is existence, of course and people – like most living things – will want to prolong their life as far as they are able. However, it is not very satisfying – young people are allowed to choose their own path in life and will apprentice with various trades to see if they could spend a large part of their working life in that pursuit. Yet choices are few – everyone’s labour is needed to sustain the living environment and there is a constant brain drain as the smarter and more daring individuals leave in the hope of a better life in a planet-based colony or among the aliens. The prospect is a life work rather than productivity.
In this world, award-winning writer Becky Chambers (she customarily uses lower case capitals for her name and the titles of her books) describes the lives of a half-dozen people and the other members of their households through mostly small-scale domestic events. The background might be interstellar in nature but the focus is squarely on the human. Even her aliens, which can be very alien indeed, are mostly interested in the impact of individual decisions and how they affect personal relationships. The contrast between the drabness of everyday life and the terror that comes from the dangers of living in space is nicely drawn. So too is the (small) variety of ways that people confined to this form of existence manage to reconcile themselves to the very limited future. Chambers, in all the works of hers that I have read, is at her best when describing individuals coming to terms with having to live cheek by jowl with different other people under stressful conditions. There are no weapons or fighting at all, which is not to every science fiction reader’s taste, although there is an apparent act of violence that is instrumental in driving the plot forward. That plot is really a means by which the characters can be shown to change and develop and, indeed, they mostly do so in satisfying ways. This is science fiction, certainly but it is also a novel of people. I did enjoy it.
John Walsh, Krirk University
Ladprao 64 