I started off on a tangent last week, trying to put the final volume of Becky Chambers’ Wayfarer Series in context before considering the book itself. Fortunately, I stopped before plunging down that rabbit hole. So tonight, down the rabbit hole we go!
Chambers’ treatment of her themes is masterful and subtle, and (for me at least) they snapped into place only after I read the whole thing in a fairly compressed time frame. Maybe someone more erudite could have read the books in real time and grasped their profundity. Not me — it took a fast downing of all four before I got it. Anyway, here’s how I read the books.
The Political World
Throughout, the Galactic Commons, the galaxy’s governing body and commonly called the GC, has been mostly in the background, but we get glimpses of it. And we get glimpses of the worlds outside the GC. In The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, Ashby and the crew of Wayfarer are contracted by the GC to journey for almost a standard galactic year to reach Hedra Ka and then construct a wormhole back to the GC so the Toremi can join the GC. In fact, Ashby has to hire Rosemary, the protagonist, more or less solely to upgrade and standardize his paperwork flow to the GC so he can land these kinds of major contracts. So it’s for the bureaucracy. She’s a great addition to the crew, but of course she is — or the plot wouldn’t be so compelling.
We actually see the GC government in action at the end of Long Way when Ashby makes his report to the committee responsible for approving the Toremi for membership. That membership is a lock until Ashby breaks protocol and reminds the committee just how hostile and impulsive the Toremi are, and I can’t quote the speech because my copy is gone and my replacement isn’t here yet, but it runs along the lines of: they fired on my ship and we don’t know why. Maybe someone in my crew said something [pro tip: they did], but I don’t think so and even if they did, it didn’t upset the reception. What will happen the first time a Toremi has too much to drink in a bar, or meets a drunk and takes offense, or dislikes the price of some item in a shop, or finds themself in any tricky social situation? Do you trust them not to shoot? Because I don’t.
Before Ashby’s speech, the Toremi membership is all but certain. But why?
Because the Toremi gives the GC access to mining for certain minerals (I think that’s it. I don’t remember, and it doesn’t really matter). The core of the reason for their admission isn’t altruism, but economics; certain species in the GC will profit from their inclusion. Despite their strict religiosity and their internecine war, they’ll we admitted to full membership. Certain people in the GC have already profited from the Toremi, and we learn this because Rosemary recognizes some of the military hardware that her father illegally shipped them (hence the unfortunate slip of the tongue that sets off the attack on the ship). The GC might enable commerce and provide an overarching governmental structure, but it’s still capable of corruption and self-dealing. Sounds rather real-world, doesn’t it?
We also get glimpses of the systems outside of the GC. For every modder haven, there’s a repressive enclave that comes straight out of nightmare. The folks who seize Corbin and imprison him because he’s a clone (I don’t think they’re GC members, but again, the details are fuzzy); the world that Pepper and Blue escape from, where children are imprisoned and worked to death to support the idyllic civilization on the other continents — and if that’s not a direct response to Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” I don’t know what is — people who turn away from the recognition of commonality are far more imperfect and dangerous than the GC. The modder’s haven in Angry Planet is a dangerous place akin to the Old West, a planet of doughty settlers and large swarming insects. Doesn’t sound terribly idyllic, does it?
We also get hints throughout the series of the good that has come from the formation of the GC: references to the Harmagian conquests and their awful crimes against other species; Dr. Chef’s telling Rosemary his history and his species collective decision to go extinct. The fact is that the world inside the GC is imperfect but mostly beneficial; the world outside the GC is extremely imperfect — navigable, but dangerous and lawless.
The only world where the collective good really works is the isolated world of Record of a Spaceborn Few, which is pure socialism. And it’s a system that works — as long as there’s no profit motive. The excess of recyclables from the wreckage of Oxomoco creates a smuggling and profiteering business that eventually claims Sawyer’s life. The lesson is clear: people will scrap even for scraps if there’s an extra buck to be made. Remember that no one in the Exodan Fleet is ever denied food and shelter. Everyone shares. And still, people will steal.
Is there a perfect governing system in the Wayfarer series? No — just as there’s no perfect governing system in our world. But some are better than others: fairer, more equitable. Still flawed: the GC dragging its heels to find a world for the stateless and refugee Akarak, that dispossession driving them to piracy and violence, causes the Akarak governing body to turn its collective back on the GC in The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, the final volume. And the GC would confiscate and destroy Sidra if anyone knew who and what she is. Even at the end, the GC has work to do.
The Individual World
Here’s where I’m struggling, because “humanity” the adjective denotes empathy and compassion, is a speciesist word. It transcends “humanity” the noun; it is a quality that any species can exhibit and, in the absence of an English word that encompasses that quality while embracing all other species, it’ll have to do.
Political reality undergirds The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet but is even quieter in A Closed and Common Orbit. The “common orbit” refers to the mirror image/parallel educations that Jane and Lovelace experience.
Jane and, belatedly, Laurian, grow into Pepper and Blue, but the story is really Pepper’s. After all, she’s the one who rescue Blue from his enslavement to the system of the Mothers and the factories. Together they build a life in Port Coriol. Jane’s evolution into Pepper is the mirror of Lovelace’s evolution into Sidra, but the goal is a common one: to become fully aware of their freedom and their responsibilities to themselves. Owl is Jane’s teacher, educating and loving her, while Pepper and then Tak guide Lovelace into becoming Sidra, a fully independent and free individual, both of them exercising free will and accepting the risks that come with it (a big one of which is that Sidra is, well, illegal. Another is that Owl is stolen merchandise).
Having defined the parameters of sentience and life in Common Orbit and, having made the case that “life” can apply to any sentient being, including robots, Record of a Spaceborn Few asks why we live, which leads us to:
Existentialism
Why are we alive? As I wrote a while ago, religion in general gets a side-eye from Chambers. Any system that separates an in-group from an out-group generally gets a side-eye from her. Isabel and Eyas in Spaceborn Few are both moral leaders in their community, and they find the isolation wearying. The Toremi in Angry Planet are zealots, while the Sianet pair that lives in Ohan is a parasite that allows him only a fraction of his natural life in return for the mystic math that allows him to navigate between space. The culture that locks up Corbin (I forget their name) because his birth is a crime to his culture is universally despised — no, religion, with its implied superiority reserved for the elect, doesn’t fare well in Wayfarers.
Without religion, though — without a moral system that promises to reward virtue and punish transgression — we are cast back on our own devices. Or, as Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov says, “Without God, everything is permitted.” And without an overarching plan to the universe, we each have to devise our own relationship with 1) ourselves, 2) the world, and 3) mortality and what comes next. Also, we have to develop the ethics by which we’ll live.
As I mentioned last time, A Closed and Common Orbit addresses the question of “humanity” and settles it conclusively: anyone who has a conscience is included, no matter how that conscience formed. In Record of a Spaceborn Few, the characters search for purpose, even as the Exodan Fleet, facing its own obsolescence, questions its continued existence. Having fulfilled its mission, what is there left to do? Can it continue to shun contact with the wider worlds, and with its own descendents?
The answer is no — the fleet needs new purpose, and Eyas finds it: Sawyer’s death provides the spur she needs to recognize that people in the GC are falling through the cracks and need a place to be. For whatever reason, the Fleet is home to the dispossessed, where no one goes hungry and everyone finds shelter and community. And Isabel realizes that the offers of a donation to the Fleet from a wealthy Aandrisk benefactor might just be the thing to keep the Fleet operating. Kip, longing to escape the Fleet and find purpose in life hears a hard truth from Isabel, that his questions and problems won’t be solved with a change of scenery, and his answers about the way life is supposed to be will still elude him, until he answers them for himself:
What’s the point? Kip, there isn’t a sapient species living or dead that hasn’t grappled hard with that. It scares us. It makes us panic, just like you’re panicking now. So if the lack of a point is what’s bothering you, if it’s making you want to kick the walls and tear your hair out, well, welcome to the party. (p. 317)
Eventually, Kip finds direction and purpose; he goes out from the Fleet to see the galaxy, and finds his way home again to guide others.
And then we come to The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, but I spent most of the day playing with a two year old and publishing time is drawing nigh, and The Galaxy is too exquisite and profound a book to hurry through, so I’m stopping here and will pick it up next Monday night. So next week, we’ll look at how the final volume knits up the whole story, and why Chambers ends the series where she does — as close to fulfillment as a writer can get.
Reviews of each volume:
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE
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