Wayfarers by Becky Chambers

I first read A long way to a small, angry planet sometime last year and I've been slowly picking away at the series ever since. I finished *Record of a spaceborn few the other week, and I think it was with that one that I felt I needed to actually sit down and reflect on how I felt about the series.

As of writing, I've read pretty much all of Becky Chambers' long-form works, excluding the last book in this series. When I have the time I hope to write about the others too. While the Wayfarers series isn't her most popular project (that likely being the more recent Monk and Robot series), it's definitely the most elaborate. Each book in the series could be read on its own, but they each attempt to explore previously introduced characters, each giving us a deeper look into a different part of the universe. This approach works well for Chambers' style of writing, and in particular, what I think her novels do best.

Chambers has a very approachable style of writing. The Wayfarers series feels "friendly" in a way that's hard to qualify, and I think that's true of most of her work. What I think is most interesting about the books is that the universe of the Wayfarers series breaks with the tradition of western science fiction in a few key ways.

The Wayfarers series tells the stories of the lives of a number of fairly normal people living under the administration of the Galactic Council, which is a sort of "liberal humanist" government. I use quotes because while I feel like that's the best way to describe them, humans are extremely marginalized within the Galactic Council. Humanity became a spacefaring species after mostly destroying its own planet. Those who fled on generation ships (the stories of whom are explored in Record of a spaceborn few) were the first to make contact, and the aliens they encountered were far more technologically advanced than them. Many members of the Galactic Council were uninterested in admitting humans to their interspecies society, and those who were saw humans as deserving of sympathy and charity. This is in stark contrast to stories like Dune and Foundation that imagine a future where humans dominate the galaxy in grand empires, or Remembrance of Earth's Past that imagines interspecies relations as being a sort of perpetual cold war.

The universe of the Wayfarers series is one where humans know their place.

A lot of people talk about Becky Chambers' work in the context of Solarpunk. Record of a spaceborn few probably fits into the genre, though the Wayfarers series isn't what I'd call solarpunk in general. Whether or not it's solarpunk, Wayfarers presents a hopeful vision of the future. Not a hopeful vision of the people overcoming the fascist feudal lord (like in Dune), or humanity prevailing over an evil foreign alien adversary (like Remembrance of Earth's Past), or intelligent technocrats saving the people from a second stone age (Foundation), but rather a vision of a world that incorporates both high technology and people living happy, normal lives, surrounded by community. It feels kind of simplistic but at the same time, it's a world that in this year of our Lord 2026 feels exotic and unrealistic. The Wayfarers series is a refreshing take on the genre.