BECKY CHAMBERS

The american writer tells us why space is for everyone

BECKY CHAMBERS The author of The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet returns with the third novel in her Galactic Commons sequence.

Many years into the future, humanity has made contact with aliens and become part of the intergalactic community. Despite this, a flotilla of generation ships, the Exodus Fleet that carried the last humans to leave Earth, is still travelling through space, and still provides a home to the descendants of those who left. But why stay aboard? It’s a question that intrigues even Becky Chambers, from whose head the Exodus Fleet originally blasted off. As she herself puts it, “If the point of a generation ship is to carry you away to a more hospitable planet why would you stay? Why have they continued to do so when they could move to alien cities or colonise other worlds? Why are people still living there? What makes this way of life special? And is it worth preserving at all?”

As the sheer number of questions here suggests, Record Of A Spaceborn Few, Chambers’ third novel in her Galactic Commons sequence doesn’t offer just one answer. Rather, as Chambers explores what happens after disaster befalls the fleet, it’s a question she answers from multiple viewpoints. For some, not leaving is down to a love of tradition and pride in a communal way of life. Less happily, fear and xenophobia play a part too. “It’s the same as for us, do you stay in your hometown or not?” says Chambers, “and the answers to that question are often very individual.”

Nonetheless, it’s difficult not to see the book’s themes as especially resonant in the wake of Trump’s election and Brexit, and in an era when political populism that plays on people’s fear of the other is on the rise. “I didn’t sit down and say I’m going to write an allegory here, no, but I think it’s impossible not to write about those themes right now,” says Chambers. “Science fiction, or any genre really, is always a reflection of the time it’s written in and there is this big question, in my country, in your country, do we face inward or do we look outward?”

family issues

It’s the kind of question that doesn’t often get asked in space opera, a genre more associated with big space battles, yet one of the reasons Chambers’ voice is so fresh is that her fiction combines spectacle with kitchen-sink drama.

“There’s more to the future than finding new and inventive ways to kill each other,” she says. “So even though war exists in these stories, that’s not the focus. I’m interested in the people who stay home, I’m interested in the people who are worried about taking care of their families and figuring out their careers, and all of these normal things that most of us are doing every day.”

But not everyone’s version of normal is the same. Chambers is the daughter of an aerospace engineer and an astrobiology educator, and her maternal grandfather was a mathematician who worked for NASA. “For me, space was just sort of what people do,” she says. “It wasn’t until I got older that I realised this is not what everyone’s family does.”

As she jokingly tells it, though, Chambers was the black sheep of the family, who developed an interest in theatre in high school. But going to work in the theatre professionally revealed a problem. Where her colleagues would spend their leisure time going to plays and readings, she “read science fiction, played videogames and watched Star Trek”.

It was time to reconnect with the girl who, as a teenager, fell in love with SF not just through Trek and Star Wars – “I don’t discriminate between the two” – but the work of Ursula K Le Guin, whose fiction made Chambers want to write. “It was this [sense of ], ‘Oh my God, science fiction can be about anything you want it to be.’ And it can be about these social themes, and it can be about culture, and it can be about biology.”

blast off

After unsuccessfully trying to write short fiction, but failing because, “I’m wordy is what it comes down to,” Chambers eventually began work on what would be her debut novel, The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet, but ran into problems. Freelancing, she found herself without work for two months around the time she was two thirds of the way through the novel’s first draft. She decided to raise the money she needed to carry on via Kickstarter. “To my eternal surprise it was a success.”

When the finished book initially failed to find a publisher, Chambers self-published a novel that would eventually, via a Worldcon meeting with editor Anne Perry of Pornokitsch fame, be picked up by Hodder & Stoughton. Even now, Chambers says, she’s still processing how having a beer with someone translated into her biggest break.

While Chambers does that, the rest of us can only be grateful that her democratic take on SF, which has an overarching idea of debunking the notion that space is the preserve of military, scientific or business elites, is loose in the world. And beyond the world. “That’s a big drive for me in telling stories about ordinary people, what the universe looks like to the rest of us, because the truth is we all belong to it and it belongs to all of us equally.”

Record Of A Spaceborn Few is published by Hodder & Stoughton on 24 July.

“THERE’S MORE TO THE FUTURE THAN FINDING NEW WAYS TO KILL EACH OTHER”