From the ground, we stand. From our ships, we live, By the stars, we hope.”
— mantra of the Exodan fleet
My apologies for the long delay between installments of LOTR; I’m doing my best, but these days it isn’t often good enough.
Anyway, when last we were here we were talking about existentialism in Becky Chambers’ terrific Wayfarer Series, centering on A Closed and Common Orbit, which explores the purpose of life and the future of Artificial Intelligence and how it all brewed together into a heady mix of humanity and philosophy. Each step of the Wayfarer Series stands on its own as slice-of-life story, but each piece contributes to the larger themes considering how is life best lived.
In The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, the philosophical questions and themes are somewhat buried in the storyline; we’re busy getting to know Ashby and crew, and questions about purpose really don’t come to the fore, except obliquely (and my copy is out on loan, so I’m relying on memory and without quotes); Jenks’ story about his mother leaving a Gaia enclave to save her (imperfect) son’s life, the modders’ body modifications to make themselves more authentically themselves, Sissex reaching out to the abandoned Aandrisk at the market to assure her that she is valued, Corbin defying orders and wishes and refusing to let Ohan die because there’s been enough grief on the ship, Rosemary fleeing her past — all of the storylines involve people attempting to live ethical lives, making choices about their future, or making peace with the choices and fates they can’t control.
All of them make their own meaning; they define their own existences. That’s important. Nowhere is there reference to a god until the ship reaches Hedra Ka, the small angry planet, where religious observants fire on the ship and thereby keep their culture pure of corrupting aliens; it’s what their deity demands, as they understand it.
It’s also really the last mention of a deity I remember in the series. There’s evidence of spirituality and cultural observances, but evangelicalism of any stripe? Not so much. And the evangelicalism that exists among the Toremi of Hedra Ka doesn’t bode well for non-Toremi (or most of the other Toremi, for that matter).
Hence the focus on existentialism. Take an eternal reward/punishment structure out of the equation, and it’s up to each of the characters to define the purpose of their own lives. Purpose forms the subtext of A Closed and Common Orbit, with Sidra and Owl both being inorganic life forms, created sentients, if you will, both of whom are fully capable of friendship, love, deceit, and the many contradictions that make up what we define as humanity. Blue and Pepper are really side characters in the development of Sidra’s potential and embrace of her humanity. Record of a Spaceborn Few goes further, interrogating the purpose of a life that’s been made obsolete but is still authentic.
Long ago, humans fled a dying earth and voyaged into the unknown in an event known as the Exodus. Eventually they encountered the Galactic Commons, a cooperative society of many different species living mostly in harmony and, in time, were accepted as members. Most of humanity now lives on the ground, a far-flung diaspora scattered among planets and colonies.
Except for a few, descendents of ship voyagers, still living on their ships in orbit around an unimportant star in an unimportant corner of the galaxy. The motley fleet is home and the people call themselves Exodans. They’re permanent ship dwellers, descendents of the Exodus, although they no longer wander, searching for a home. The fleet’s mission has succeeded — now what?
Record presents Chambers’ most direct meditation on what it is to find purpose in life. It’s a classic existential crunch point: what is the reason for living? And is there a reason that one should live ethically, if there’s neither reward nor damnation at the end of the rainbow?
The answer to those questions is, of course, deeply personal and individual, although the society is communal and the economy socialist. The questions are the same ones we face daily — how to shape meaning and significance out of the raw materials of our lives, how to maintain our dignity despite our circumstances, how to find peace and worthiness in a world that may not value us. For an exploration of those questions alone, Record of a Spaceborn Few is well worth reading.
Plotwise, the stories follow the lives of people who find themselves dissatisfied, their lives missing something. Tessa knows her job is obsolescing and her daughter is stuck with lingering trauma from having witnessed the Oxomoco implosion. Eyas is a caretaker, a combination priest/mortician/gardener whose work separates her from the rest of her community. Isabel is an archivist charged with hosting Ghuh’loloan, a Harmagian ethnologist who studies the Exodan culture; she spends the novel navigating between an alien and nativist hostility among the Exodans. And then there’s the pair of Kip and Sawyer, two alienated and somewhat lost youths whose lives follow very different trajectories. As a child with his dad, Kip watches the arrival of an Aeluon ship that’s come to help with cleanup of the Oxomoco disaster, and for the first time he sees wealth:
He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. And the longer he sat there, the less he was sure about anything. His insides began to tangle themselves again as he watched the Admiral greet their otherworldly neighbours. Her uniform no longer looked cool, the crowd no longer looked smartly dressed, and the dock no longer looked normal, not with a big flying gemstone resting in the middle of it. The Aeluons were her to clean up a mess the Fleet couldn’t, a mess that wouldn’t have happened without busted ships and worn-out tech. They shook hands Human-style with the stinky, stitched-up council, and beneath Kip’s excitement, beneath his wonder, a sadness spread.
He watched the Aeluons, and he felt ashamed.
pp. 16-17
That awareness of their poverty is a source of pride and anger for the Exodans, too proud to ask for help, too poor to do anything but share what they have. It’s an interesting, and very human, dynamic, one that comes to a head around Ghuh’loloan, the exotic and wealthy stranger who, the Exodans fear, is measuring them with the eye of an anthropologist bent on recording a remote tribe before its extinction. Isabel’s spouse Tamsin forces the matter, asking the Harmagian, “Do you think we’re worthy of the rest of the galaxy’s time? . . . GC membership, doated tech, this star you gave us. Do you think we’re worth it?” (p. 298)
The Harmagian fanned her dactyli in thought. ‘I am here, am I now? But that is not what you are asking. You are not asking if the Reskit Institute finds you worthy of study. You are asking what I, Ghuh’loloan think of you.’
‘Yes,’ Tamsin said.
‘That is a risky thing to ask, dear host, but I would not insult you with a dishonest answer. . . . Very well. You are a species of slim means. You produce nothing beyond extra bodies to perform labour, and you have contributed nothing to the technological progress of the GC at large. You value being self-reliant, and you were, once, but now you eat our food and harvest our suns. If we kicked you out now, it would be difficult for you to sustain yourselves as you did before. And even with our help, the age of these vessels means you are constantly, irresponsibly courting a disaster like the one you’ve already weathered. These are the facts. Now, let us discuss the facts of my own species. We are the wealthiest species alive today. We want for nothing. Without us, there would be no tunnels, no ambi, no galactic map. But we achieved these things through subjugation. Violence. We destroyed entire worlds — entire species. It took a galactic war to stop us. We learned. We apologised. We changed. But we can’t give back the things we took. We’re still benefitting from them, and others are still suffering from actions centuries old. So, are we worthy? We, who give so much only because we took so much? Are you worthy, you who take without giving but have done no harm to your neighbours? . . . Show me the species that has never wronged another. Show me the one who has always been perfect and fair.’ She flexed her body, her alien limbs curling strong. ‘Either we are all worthy of the Commons, dear Tamsin, or none of us are.’
pp. 298-299
Those questions of poverty, pride, worthiness, belonging, all thread through Record. The disaster Ghuh’loloan refers to is the destruction of the Oxomoco at the opening of the novel. It’s not sabotage, but simple equipment failure that kills thousands of people. The event proves a crisis for Eyas, as there are too many bodies to recycle, and a bounty of recyclables that stirs the innate greed of a few. Sawyer, a young man who grew up planetside but fell through the cracks and has come to Fleet looking for purpose and a home, falls afoul of those few. His death is becomes a catalyst and tragedy for others.
One of the most affected by his senseless death is Eyas, who has been drifting, lonely and alienated from her own shipmates. She confesses that she had met Sawyer; he asked her for advice and, preoccupied and annoyed, she blew him off. She didn’t see him; she might have saved him, but didn’t. She channels her guilt into action — an association to reach out to the rest of the galaxy in welcome:
If it was a matter of everybody wanting to leave here, fine. But that’s not the case. People aren’t just staying in the Fleet. They’re coming back. We have such disdain for outsiders who come and act like this is a museum, but what about the Sawyers? What about the people who don’t have a place out there, who think that our way of life has some appeal? We look at them and we say, oh, stupid city kids, stupid Martians, they don’t know how things are. They don’t understand how life works out here. So, let’s teach them. Let’s teach them, instead of brushing them off and laughing behind their backs. Let’s bring them in.
p. 293
Some leave, some come back. It’s all about finding your place. Kip, who grew up ashamed at his community’s poverty, unable to find a vocation or any place to fit, is the one who finds Sawyer’s body and the people who killed him, and turns up at his funeral, where only Eyas, Isabel and Tamsin are in attendance. Isabel asks him to take part, telling him, “You helped this man. You helped the right people find him. You’re the closest thing he has to a friend” (pp. 277-278).
Isabel dug as best she could, and as she did so, her heart filled with a complicated tangle. Sorrow for Sawyer, whose time had been stolen. Anger for Sawyer, who’d been led astray. Respect for Eyas, and all of her profession. Respect for Kip, too, who dug vigorously, even as his face became covered in silent tears. Love for Tamsin. Love for her living family. Love for her dead family. Fear of death. Joy for life.
It was, in the end, a proper funeral.
p. 279
If there’s a point to all the threads in this disparate, lovingly woven tapestry, it’s this: life is all about finding your place and your purpose. It’s about finding worth in what you do, and dignity and pride in the way you live your life. Still shaken and much matured by his experience, Kip leaves the Fleet to go to college, to learn about the worlds out there. And then he comes home to become an archivist, his job, his responsibility, to ensure that all stories are preserved and no one is forgotten. The boy who was ashamed has grown into the man who finds meaning in life, in every life.
Reference
Chambers, Becky. Record of a Spaceborn Few. New York: Harper Voyager, 2018.
PS: Happy Shakespeare’s birthday eve!
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