Review: Record of a Spaceborn Few

Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"From the Beginning
We Have Wandered
To This Day, We Wander Still
But for All Our Travels
We Are Not Lost
We Fly With Courage
 And Will, Undying"

The depth of my love for Becky Chambers' novels cannot be overstated. Her books are simply a joy to read. Imagine a world in which you have Space Opera with joy, with reflective personal exploration, and in which species find more in common than in difference with one another. I'm sure a lot of people think that this is sugar-coated sci-fi but through gentle and quiet exploration, Chambers has created a simply glorious trilogy of standalone books, with characters you can love and worlds that fascinate. This is a space opera series where the biggest battles are often internal and deal with the question of what one offers the Universe.

What Record of a Spaceborn Few offers us is a quintet of characters, alternating between their intertwined lives in the Exodan Fleet. On the one hand, their stories seem simple and yet on the other, their stories are everything about the Fleet you want or need to know. Eyas, Isabel, Kip, Sawyer, and Tessa (Ashby's sister) are marvelous, richly drawn characters, and the secondary characters are equally fine. The quiet wonder of a simple chapter, like one in which Isabel and her wife Tamsin (in her seventies!) go for a wild space joyride, rekindling old memories and watching the stars illuminate the world around them will stay with me always. That's just a taste of the magic of this book.

I hope that this isn't the conclusion to the Wayfarer series but is rather another installment in the Universe of Becky Chamber's imaginative world. I haven't had nearly enough yet.


I received a Digital Review Copy from HarperVoyager and Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.

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