Record of a Spaceborn Few
Sep. 13th, 2018 07:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraRecord of a Spaceborn Few, Becky Chambers, the third book in the same universe as Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and Closed and Common Orbit, although it's even more of a standalone/less of a sequel than Orbit was; you're definitely fine picking the series up here if you'd like. I enjoyed this one but did not have the strong feelings about it that I did about Orbit, and I'll put the rest of my thoughts behind a spoiler cut.
So this is very much a fantasy of place, of a way of life... people quarrel over how they like to use the word "utopian" so I will dodge around that and just say that Chambers is imagining a society with many satisfyingly wish-fulfilling details, from universal free housing to everyone using the same genderless honorific to sex work being a respected calling. The joke about generation ships is that you have to fill the ships with people who haven't read any generation-ship stories (this joke is from a recent essay or review but I can't find it now) but Chambers is positing a world where the ship-planners actually made it work and have come up with a society with a lot of appeal.
There's a way in which I find that hard to buy into - underneath the shiny details about composting the dead and voting on workplace management, a big part of what Chambers is selling here is a monocultural society in which everyone knows the same ritual words to say at a christening or a burial, lives in a neighborhood and city laid out by the same urban-planning design principles, and shares the same basic values re things like access to health care or age of consent. (Or at least I didn't get any feeling that there were ongoing clashes or political conflicts about those things.) Chambers gives us a couple of ongoing major cultural upheavals - barter vs money, concerns about immigration and emigration - but these all seem to be relatively "recent" conflicts arising in the (several-generation) recontact era, contact with the larger galaxy destabilizing what's implied to be a stable-state culture before that. As much as I too am attracted to the idea of living in this society with these affirming humanistic rituals, I found it hard and a little disturbing to imagine the implied history that wiped out Earth cultural variation in their development. (And also hard to buy that there aren't actually six different versions of the burial service and it's *really contentious* which one people use, or varying generational taboos around recreational substances, or any sense of subcultures just as a thing that humans spontaneously generate.)
Would definitely go to the panel talking about this, Unkindness of Ghosts, Fallow, and Stars Are Legion as different manifestations of contemporary desires and anxieties around planned self-contained societies.
On another topic entirely, I found the red shirt foreshadowing kind of hilarious ("okay guys his *shirt* is *red*, he has a *red shirt*, did we all get that") but also kind of... thoughtful, in a way? Like tagging for character death, so we could get ready for it. Thanks, Chambers.
So this is very much a fantasy of place, of a way of life... people quarrel over how they like to use the word "utopian" so I will dodge around that and just say that Chambers is imagining a society with many satisfyingly wish-fulfilling details, from universal free housing to everyone using the same genderless honorific to sex work being a respected calling. The joke about generation ships is that you have to fill the ships with people who haven't read any generation-ship stories (this joke is from a recent essay or review but I can't find it now) but Chambers is positing a world where the ship-planners actually made it work and have come up with a society with a lot of appeal.
There's a way in which I find that hard to buy into - underneath the shiny details about composting the dead and voting on workplace management, a big part of what Chambers is selling here is a monocultural society in which everyone knows the same ritual words to say at a christening or a burial, lives in a neighborhood and city laid out by the same urban-planning design principles, and shares the same basic values re things like access to health care or age of consent. (Or at least I didn't get any feeling that there were ongoing clashes or political conflicts about those things.) Chambers gives us a couple of ongoing major cultural upheavals - barter vs money, concerns about immigration and emigration - but these all seem to be relatively "recent" conflicts arising in the (several-generation) recontact era, contact with the larger galaxy destabilizing what's implied to be a stable-state culture before that. As much as I too am attracted to the idea of living in this society with these affirming humanistic rituals, I found it hard and a little disturbing to imagine the implied history that wiped out Earth cultural variation in their development. (And also hard to buy that there aren't actually six different versions of the burial service and it's *really contentious* which one people use, or varying generational taboos around recreational substances, or any sense of subcultures just as a thing that humans spontaneously generate.)
Would definitely go to the panel talking about this, Unkindness of Ghosts, Fallow, and Stars Are Legion as different manifestations of contemporary desires and anxieties around planned self-contained societies.
On another topic entirely, I found the red shirt foreshadowing kind of hilarious ("okay guys his *shirt* is *red*, he has a *red shirt*, did we all get that") but also kind of... thoughtful, in a way? Like tagging for character death, so we could get ready for it. Thanks, Chambers.
