Record of a Spaceborn Few (Wayfarers Book 3)

It’s hard for me to articulate just how much I loved this book. I mean, I know that’s my purpose as someone who reviews books on a blog, but Becky Chambers always leaves me a little bit speechless with her writing. Her books are like warm hugs that I never want to let go of. This is the third book in her Wayfarers series and it focuses on a few characters who live in The Fleet, several huge generational ships that were built by humans to leave the planet behind and look for a home elsewhere in the universe. Only instead of finding a new planet, they got a new star to orbit around and the ships became their new planet, so to speak. Many of the Exodans have since left the ships and settled elsewhere, but some have stayed and they try and stay true to their ideals and way of life aboard the fleet. But everything changes eventually and as more and more people leave the Exodans find themselves having to adapt and be willing to open their doors to the outside, allowing for immigration so that they have enough people to sustain the ships and all the various jobs that need to be done to keep things running. The entire culture of the Exodans is super interesting. Because of the unique living situation, purposefully designed in such a way, they’ve developed their own culture that very much revolves around sharing with each other and equality. Even when it comes to jobs, there are some that all have to take turns at so as not to make any one person do the things that no one wants to…

Chambers' Wayfarers stories are set in the Galactic Commons, a galactic federation of intelligent species, most of them significantly older than the newcomer humans. Each has looked at a different part of life in the Galactic Commons. This one is set in the Exodus Fleet, the fleet carrying the descendants of the last humans to leave Earth, fleeing its environmental collapse. They're a distinctly different culture from the humans who settled Mars and the outer planets prior to that final collapse. Originally, they were looking for an Earthlike planet to start over on, and they wanted their descendants to be prepared for planetary life. In addition to their quite functional food- and oxygen-producing farms, they have decorative oxygen gardens, theaters that show nature videos of Earth, murals on the walls that, functionally, don't need to be anything but bare metal. They also guard against the development of the competition and divisions that helped destroy Earth. Everyone has windows onto space in their living quarters. Everyone is guaranteed "if we have food they will eat, if we have air they will breathe, if we have fuel they will fly." Their economic system is barter. And membership in the Galactic Commons has brought changes, changes that can disrupt this system. Tessa is a supervisor in salvage operations--managing and sorting what comes in, sending it on to where those materials are most useful, making sure nothing goes to waste. She has two children, a husband with…

Series Info/Source: This is the third book in the Wayfarers series. I bought a copy of this as an ebook for my Kindle. Thoughts: This book was fairly wandering plot-wise compared to the previous two books. However, I ended up completely drawn into this world and loved learning about these characters. This book alternates between a number of different POVs. All of the characters we read about are somehow tied into the Exodus Fleet, the original human fleet that left Earth. Humans still live in the spacefaring Exodus Fleet and there has been a horrible tragedy that is affecting them all. We join the story after the tragedy and get to see how it affects these different characters and their lives. This is a very character driven book. The plot here is thin; there is a slight mystery about the death of one character but aside from that this is a more day to day life type of story. This book looks at these individual characters' lives and we get to watch as they weave in and out of each other. This is a fascinating world and a fascinating way of life. All of the characters we spend time with are completely engaging and utterly intriguing. As you can tell this is more of a space opera than some action-packed sci-fi thriller. There are heavy themes around the importance of tradition but also around the acceptance of growth and change. Throughout we see the very traditional Exodans being forced to (and willing to) accept alien technology and changes in life. There are ebbs and…

It's not that I didn't enjoy this book... But I didn't feel it was up to the standards set by the previous two in the series. It was an ambitious effort, but ultimately didn't succeed for my own tastes. This one is slow paced, has too many main characters, and several of the characters didn't feel like their personalities were particularly distinct. I kept having to go back and remind myself who I was reading about, and more than once mixed up Eras, Isabel or Tessa. I also didn't find it as interesting to read a third book in a series that was so thoroughly unconnected to the previous two -- sharing no characters directly. And I really didn't like Sawyer's story arc.

In short, another transcendent character-driven science fiction story from a master of the form. I'm late in coming to the party; I started a few months back with her second in the series, "A Closed and Common Orbit", which upon completion I felt was one of the very best fiction books, of any genre, I have ever read. I then dropped back to her first, which was excellent if maybe not quite to the Olympian height of the second. While I eagerly anticipated reading this third of the series, I was fairly sure it would not come close to that second one. I was wrong; the only reason I might rate this one very slightly behind the second is that I read the latter first and the surprise factor is less now. Others, most particularly Mal Warwick, have explained their liking for this book much better than I ever could; I'll just say that I concur with just about every positive comment to date. And to those that have responded negatively about the chapter organization, I can say that I understand the comments but respectfully disagree with them. It does take some concentration to keep the different characters and threads straight, but I believe the diligence is rewarded at the end by the masterful way that the author brings them together. I would particularly disagree with the suggestion by one reviewer that the different threads be read consecutively, one full thread at a time in sequence; I cannot imagine how the overall experience of the book would be anything but ruined by that…