Here we are at the end of Becky Chamber’s Wayfarer Series, and I have a confession to make: I peeked.
When I write a book review, I don’t read other people’s reviews first. I don’t want to be tempted to recycle other talking points or, worse, be tempted to insight that is not my own. It’s better to not even look. But I did give in on this one, and gave a cursory look on the internet and, to my surprise, initial reviewers didn’t have much to say, other than that the book was a fine read. There was one review that made me wonder if we had read the same book, written by an author who honed in on one aspect that was very personal to them and didn’t write much about the rest of it.
Sometimes I think that the whole “had a good beat, could dance to it” effect happens because of the length of time that passes between publication dates. If you read each of the Wayfarer books when they were first written — The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet in 2016, A Closed and Common Orbit in 2017, Record of a Spaceborn Few in 2018, and finally The Galaxy, and the Ground Within in 2021 — that’s five years, and it would be easy to lose the thread that binds all these books together. It’s not “cozy space opera,” whatever that is; it’s not “slice-of-life” drama: it’s a probing examination of what it means to live an ethical life.
All the books take place in a roughly contemporaneous timeline, so events are compressed. In Galaxy Pei is on her way to stay on Wayfarer in the vacation she promises Ashby at the end of Planet. Remember that a sect of the Toremi fired on Wayfarer and almost destroyed the ship, killing Lovey in the process. The reason: the Toremi of Hedra Ka fear change. The reason the Galactic Commons want to admit the Toremi as members: mining rights and economic gain (if I remember correctly. My copy’s been out on loan for so long that I’m going to replace it and think of my old copy as a child who’s gone out into the world to spread joy).
The tensions between the commercial/colonial impulses of the Galactic Commons, or the GC, and the resentments of its individual member species is understated throughout the series, but very much present. The prejudices that species face is likewise always present — and this is turning into a review of the whole series. I’ll pick this up next week, but I wanted to mention those tensions, because change, prejudice, and an interrogation of the GC’s reason for existing are all very much in play in The Galaxy, and the Ground Within. If I treat them lightly tonight, it’s because I want to put them in context when looking at the whole series.
The Galaxy’s set-up is a classic: a handful of strangers marooned in a saloon, or diner, or a tavern at the end of the world, or a hotel, while outside a storm rages, one that keeps everyone from leaving. With nothing else to do, the strangers talk — prejudices are encountered, mutual dependence develops, there’s a crisis that brings everyone to work in common purpose, and all depart much the wiser.
In this case, the storm is a satellite maintenance procedure that goes wrong and brings down all the satellites around Gora, a literal nowhere whose only redeeming feature is that it occupies space at the intersection of five wormholes that all lead to better, more interesting places. Gora is a planet-sized truckstop, inhabited by enterprising hosts in discreet habitation domes. One of these hosts, a Laru named Ouloo, runs a definitely lower-tier establishment called the Five Hop One Stop. Roveg, an artist and sim designer, lands at the Five Hop because all the good venues are booked up. He observes that
Someone had worked hard on this place, someone who substituted love for money whenever the latter ran short. (p. 29)
Ouloo is earnest and determined to show her clients, whatever their species, respect and a good respite, even if the guest’s stay is only a few hours. Roveg and the others — Speaker, an Akarak, and Pei, whom we’ve met before, an Aeluon — intend to stay just long enough for clearance to navigate through the hub and be on their way, but then the sky catches fire and all the satellites crash. They’re stuck. One day stretches into several. Tensions rise. Roveg is on his way to an appointment he can’t miss, and both Speaker and Pei have places to be. Speaker is especially frantic because she can’t reach her sister Tracker, on the ship in orbit and currently out of touch because communications are down. And Tracker has a lung condition that makes her quite fragile.
All Akarak twins were halved souls, but Speaker and Tracker’s bond was what was called a triet. ‘Straight cut’ was the literal definition, but the word iIhreet was weighty, reverent, a way of describing a pair made whole by the other’s complement. (p. 59)
The Akarak are a conquered people, exploited and enslaved by the Harmagians. If you remember from last week, Ghuh’loloan, a Harmagian anthropologist (don’t correct me, I know it’s speciesist, but I don’t have a better description), confesses her species’ offenses and admits the crimes can’t be made right and people still suffer from what the Harmagian empire did before the GC. One of their crimes was the dispossession the Akarak. The Akarak have no planet and no way to make a living. They carry a reputation for piracy. They have no home, and the GC has been, shall we say slow? to rectify the situation. Speaker admits to Roveg that the idea of a home planet sounds magical, but utterly beyond the Akarak’s reach:
I both grieve and am incapable of grieving, because I don’t know what it is that I’ve lost. And none of my kind can tell me. Nobody’s left who remembers. (p. 198)
Although the Akarak have the reputation for being violent raiders and we met them in Planet where they almost killed Ashby, Speaker and Tracker are deliberately nonviolent. Their names define their skills: Speaker communicates with the outside world, and Tracker is skilled at finding other Akaraks. Speaker expects and anticipates prejudice, and adjusts to accommodate and disarm it. She admits to Roveg:
I can’t alway speak my mind, not if I want to get the things I need or go places I need to go. Everything I do, every word I say, is calculated to make people comfortable. To make them respect me. None of it is a lie, but it is an act, and it’s one that gets very, very tiring. (p. 249)
Her words would resonate with anyone who has encountered systemic discrimination of any stripe, I think. Despite her diplomatic facade, Speaker does reserve the right to dislike on sight, and she absolutely prejudges Pei. Pei returns the favor. The antipathy is mutual, although it’s not clear at first why.
Speaker and Roveg naturally bond. Despite their differences, they approach each other with curiosity and respect. And both are exiles from their homeland — Speaker being stateless, Roveg being a political outcast hoping for permission to go home to see his sons come of age. He’s beset with anxiety as hours stretch into days, and doing his best not to panic. They have much in common. As Roveg says:
“Quelin fear outsiders because we use them as scapegoats for the things we fear about ourselves. We bar cultural exchange because change frightens us. Whereas your people . . .’ He looked at her. “You fear outsiders because they gave you no choice in the change they forced upon you.” (p. 136)
Among the characters, we have natural allies and natural adversaries. Speaker has no memory of a homeworld, nor does anyone she knows, but the fact of dispossession traumatizes her and the rest of the Akarak. This trauma, or wisdom, or perspective — whatever you choose to call it — informs her approach to the world, and fuels her antagonism to Pei.
Now, we’ve met Pei before, in Planet. She’s a gun- and cargo runner for Aeluon forces fighting the Rosk over a planet on the border of Rosk space. Her job is to supply a war zone. Planet ends with Wayfarer being attacked, damaged, and surviving immediately before Galaxy begins, so we know that Pei is anxious to meet up with Wayfarer and to see her lover Ashby for herself. She’s on edge for other reasons, too, but as prickly as she is, she’s no match for Speaker when the subject of just and unjust war emerges:
Just because there’s no one living on a planet does not mean it’s yours for the taking. Do you not see how dangerous that mindset is? Do you not think that treating the galaxy as if it is something to be endlessly used will always, always end in tragedy? You think you’ve broken the cycle. You haven’t. You’re in a less violent period of the exact same cycle, and you don’t see it. And the line of what you find to be justifiable cause is going to keep slipping and slipping until you end up right where you started. You haven’t fixed anything. You put a stamp and a permit and a shiny coat of paint on an idea that has been fundamentally damaged from day one. You engaged in bloody theft and you called it progress, and no matter how much better you think you’ve made things, no matter how good your intentions are, that will always be the root of the GC. You cannot divorce any of what you do from that. Ever. (p. 223)
We’ll come back to this next week, but the cycle Speaker criticizes is the same one that drives our own politics and geopolitics: capitalism, safety, security, self-defense, colonialism, the drive for wealth — it’s all there, and almost indistinguishable from our own shared lived experience.
As there are natural allies and adversaries, Chambers also gives us an array of personal philosophies, from Roveg’s critique of his own people as xenophobic to his belief that all ethics are situational. He embraces chaos:
Life was fluid, gradient, ever shifting. People — a group comprised of every sapient species, organic or otherwise — were chaos, but chaos was good. Chaos was the only sensible conclusion. There was no law that was just in every situation, no blanket rule that could apply to everyone, no explanation that accounted for every component. This did not mean that laws and rules were not helpful, or that explanations should not be sought, but rather that there should be no fear in changing them as needed, for nothing in the universe ever held still. (pp. 158-159)
It’s Roveg, however, with his exquisite taste in art and gastronomy, his gentle dignity and innate kindness, who invites us to pass judgement on Ouloo, the owner of the Five Hop, as a ridiculous figure:
Laru were so floppy. Their limbs were like animated noodles, their stubby torsos thick and bumbling, their long tail-like necks somewhere between a nightmare and a grand cosmic joke. This Laru — Ouloo — he assumed — had styled her fur in an explosion of intense curls that reminded him of nothing so much as the stacked rows of icing he’d seen once at a Human bakery. (p. 32)
Ouloo runs the Five Hop on a shoestring as she’s raising a child (and every parent of a pre-teen or who remembers a pre-teen will read Tupo with a laugh and a shock of recognition). Those two things define her life: her child and her customers, and she’s determined to do everything possible to make it work. What the Five Hop lacks in luxury, it more than makes up for in effort. And cake. (Seriously, she spends most of the book making dessert and serving it.)
Our first impression, paired with Ouloo’s breathless good cheer, make us tend to discount her as not a lot more than comic relief, but that would be a mistake. Because when tensions boil over between Speaker and Pei, it’s Ouloo who speaks with deceptive simplicity and great wisdom (and I’m truncating her speech, because I want you to read the book; it’s worth reading in full):
I don’t know much about politics or ... borders, or whatever it is you’re fighting about. And I should know about those things, probably, because I’m sure it’s irresponsible of me to not know how everything works, but ... everything is just so much [. . . .] I don’t need to know those things to be able to tell that something isn’t working. That something is wrong. [. . . .] I don’t have an … an ideology. I don’t know the right terms to discuss these things. I don’t know the science behind any of it. I’m sure I sound silly right now. But I just want everyone to get along, and to be well taken care of. That’s it. I want everybody to be happy, and I do not care how we get there. (pp. 225-226)
When Tupo, who is very much Ouloo’s child in xyr desire to be a hospitable host, suffers a medical emergency and the Five Hop, like the rest of the planet, is still on lockdown, Pei and Speaker work together to stabilize xyr. And the crisis inspires Roveg to turn the tables and cater to Ouloo for a change. The emergencies pass; Tupo and Ouloo offer their thanks, and the members of this unlikely fellowship find new ways to gift each other. Speaker offers Pei life-altering perspective and advice, Pei pulls political strings to ensure that Roveg will see his children, and Roveg gives Speaker something she has never known: “Roveg had built a world for her, and she’d entered it on the shore of a lake” (313). It’s a simulation, complete with wind and water, smells and sensory experience; it’s the chance to experience a world. Along with the sim, Roveg has given her permission to share, so as Speaker and Tracker head for their rakree, they’ll be able to share a virtual world with other Akarak.
Is it a neat ending? It’s satisfying, but I wouldn’t call it neat. The GC’s problems have not been solved, but — well, maybe Roveg is right and there are no blanket solutions. And maybe Ouloo’s right that we all deserve to be happy, no matter how we get there. One thing is certain: although the series is over and we bid farewell to the Wayfarers, in my mind I know that the Five Hop One Stop will greet three friends again, and the cake will be awesome.
Reference: Chambers, Becky. The Galaxy, and the Ground Within. New York: Harper Voyager, 2021.
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