The Galaxy, and the Ground Within is the fourth and apparently concluding book in Becky Chambers' Hugo Award-winning Wayfarers series, following on from The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, A Closed and Common Orbit and Record of a Spaceborn Few (Chambers has a superb facility with book names, it has to be said). This isn't a series in the traditional sense with continuing characters and narrative elements, more something like Iain Banks' The Culture with a shared setting and occasional references to the events of other books but each volume can be enjoyed fully as a stand-alone.
Like the other books in the series, The Galaxy, and the Ground Within is a very relaxed novel. There is personal jeopardy but it is brief and limited. The book's primary interest is more about how people - in this case examples of multiple different alien species - interact and work together in the face of adversity. It's something of a space disaster novel, where the disaster is very brief and isn't going to kill anyone after a short period, but its consequences take days to play out during which our protagonists have to figure out how to endure.
Basically, this is science fiction mashed with the structure of John Hughes' The Breakfast Club, and it works really well. We get to know the three alien visitors, the owner of the space hotel they have to stay in and her son, and none of the characters are human, which is surprisingly rare in science fiction. Each one of the four species the characters belong to gets a lot of development in terms of their personal characterisation and also worldbuilding related to their different species, and how this limits their interactions. One of the species relies on colour cues to determine the other person's mood and intents, whilst another can only leave their ship in an environment suit. Being space travellers - wayfarers - means they have some natural curiosity about other species, but sometimes find it hard to deal with those with a very different worldview to their own, informed by a totally different biology and history.
If the book has a theme, it's probably the rotest of the Star Trek rote: to understand one another's differences and find ways of getting along. It feels like a well-explored idea, but also a universal and constant one, and one it never hurts to revisit. Especially here with the circumstances well set-up to facilitate that story.
Chambers always walks a tightrope between her books being chill and enjoyable, and boring, and Record of a Spaceborn Few started tilting alarmingly towards the latter. The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (****) tilts back towards the former. For those who need action, intrigue and lasers in their space opera, steer clear. For those who are more interested in worldbuilding and character dynamics, this is a fine and enjoyable slice of lived-in science fiction. The novel is available now.
Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.
No comments:
Post a Comment