SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Galaxy and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers: https://t.co/9MIF7wj25O
— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) January 30, 2021
Short Review: 6.5 out of 10
1/3
Short Review (cont): The Fourth Wayfarer book features a quartet of aliens marooned on at an inn on a waystation planet, forcing them to learn about each other.
— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) January 30, 2021
The character work is great as usual, but the book kind of fails where it deals with oppression & colonization.
2/3
Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on April 20, 2021 in exchange for a potential review. I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.
The Galaxy and the Ground Within is the fourth - and seemingly final (according to the acknowledgements) - book in Becky Chambers' Hugo Winning "Wayfarer" series of novels, which began with A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. I've said on this blog many times before how much I prefer character-focused novels to plot or idea-focused ones, and the Wayfarer novels take that to an extreme: they feature practically no overarching plot, but instead stories of characters in a scifi world in which humans have left a devastated earth and met a mostly peaceful coalition of alien races. It's an optimistic setting, and the first three books have all been tremendous, especially the first book and third (Record of a Spaceborn Few), so when this fourth book showed up on Netgalley, I requested it immediately and didn't dare hope to get a copy....and was extraordinarily excited when I did.
And for the first time, I found myself not really thinking a book in this series actually worked. The book has perhaps even less of a plot than its predecessors, and Chambers does an excellent job with the four main characters - this time around, there isn't a human among them, so we're dealing entirely with alien species and personalities here. As usual, the book is pretty much a stand-alone exploration of these characters, something Chambers usually excels at. But this time, Chambers attempts through one of the characters to also cover important issues of oppression, colonization, and the aftermath of it all and the attempt to touch on those themes clashes with the otherwise optimistic tone and it doesn't work at all. It results in a a major misstep which for me almost overshadowed everything else.
The Planet Gora contains nothing of value...except for its location in the Galaxy, which allows it to serve as a hub for interstellar travelers with many different destinations. So when three alien travelers - an Aeluon, a Quelin, and an Akarak, come to a resting stop on the planet - one run by a Laru and her child - they expect to do little more than stretch their legs or other appendages, stock up on fuel, and then depart.
But when an accident causes a catastrophe in Gora's orbit, the five of them find themselves stuck together and forced to truly discover how their own perceptions of the galaxy and the races within it, not least of all their own, may not truly be accurate.....
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Yeah, this has to be one of my shortest plot summaries ever, because as with other Chambers books, there really isn't one other than seeing four/five (four point of view characters and one child) characters from different backgrounds - in this case alien races - mashed together in the same location and seeing how they interact and change from the experiences. The biggest obvious difference from the other three books in this series is that none of the characters are human - we've met all four alien races before (and indeed, we've met one of these characters before - Pei, the Aeluon, is a minor character from book 1 who was the romantic partner of that book's captain Ashby), but never got to see any of this world from their own perspectives.
And again, Chambers is excellent at showcasing the perspectives of these very different people/species. You have Speaker, the most interesting of the characters, who is a member of a race in Akaraks who were once enslaved by another race and now no longer have a planet of their own and, due to being methane based, are forced to wear mecha-suits to coexist with other species. They're also so short lived that each member of their species is forced to specialize (Speaker specializes in speaking to others) in their skills, and cannot take time for granted. Then you have Roveg, the exiled Quelin whose race exiled him for daring to even hint that their xenophobic approach to the galaxy, blaming everyone else for their ills, might not be right. Then there's our returning character Pei, who is both at comfort within her species' hierarchy and at the same time not at all due to her human lover, which puts her at odds with her species' taboos. And you have the host Ouloo, a Laru who took up her job so she could teach her child that even other species deserved to be called family, not just other Laru. All of these characters are well done in their personalities and in one particular common aspect - their clash with the cultural/racial norms of their species and their own desires (with one exception I'll get to in a second).
And yet, despite the extremely good character work, for perhaps the first time in the series, the characters don't actually all have any particular character arcs...or when they do, they're not even particularly interesting. Pei's arc is the most clearly defined - her species' biology forces her to make a choice between a cultural emphasis on reproduction and going to meet her human lover for a vacation (which readers may recall from the end of book 1).....but it's such an obvious choice that she's going to make, and while Chambers writes the conflict within her well, it's kind of a retro internal conflict (To have a child to meet the standards of a community vs to not have a child and to live with whom one wnats) that feels like something out of a book from 30 years ago? Meanwhile, Roveg and Ouloo don't really have character arcs other than learning to like the other aliens and learning that their understanding of the galaxy isn't quite accurate, as evidenced by Speaker, whose race which is frequently stereotyped as untrustworthy and violent and cannot breath the same air as any other sentient race in the galaxy. But Chambers still imbues these characters with such life that it still almost works as well as her other books.
And then there's Speaker, the best and yet most frustrating character, which is where Chambers' magic just stops working. Don't get me wrong, Speaker is great as an individual character and easy to care for. But Speaker's story is very much that of colonization and post-colonization and oppression, a darker subject and more difficult subject that has been previously handled by the series. And the book portrays the devastation of that oppression of Speaker's race, the Akaraks, very well through Speaker's POV and a few excerpts from other documents (one in particular is tremendously quotable in this regard): they were conquered by another alien race and their planet made inhospitable for them with their unique methane-based way of life (instead of oxygen based) and even when freed, they have no home planet to go to....and the GC, largely controlled by those aliens, keeps finding reasons to not give them full status or another planet, all the while giving such recognition to other species such as humanity. Speaker herself, who is an expert in communication with other races, finds that she has to censor herself slightly in how she speaks, so that she is always making everyone else feel comfortable. It's an uncomfortably real and, for this series, uncharacteristically negative part of this universal setting, which has mostly before been portrayed positively, even if not utopian. And it's a negative real world problem without answers that conflicts with the series' optimistic tone.
This tonal dissonance leads to the book's big misstep, which for me at least overshadows everything. I read this as an e-ARC so I won't quote anything, but Pei and Speaker have a conflict over Pei's support for the Aeluon war effort, in which Aeluon's defend border colonies from another species: from Speaker's perspective, while the other side is wrong, so are the Aeluons for taking "unclaimed" planets for themselves just because they got there first - from Pei's perspective, they were causing no one harm by taking the planets and their own homeworld almost killed them long ago in an ecological disaster, so their expansion was necessary. Speaker is clearly right here (after all, why should the Aeluon's have such planets when they have plenty already, while Speaker's race is forbidden from having any planets they can live on) but the book never has Pei recognize that fact. Instead, the two are forced to cooperate chapters later due to a crisis* and the book basically just moves on as if the conflict isn't as important as everyone having individual moments of happiness thereafter, which just...no. It's made even worse by Speaker concluding that she can never be comfortable with what Pei does/believes - even if she believes Pei means well, because ignoring the issue just "allows problems to persist. - but then still acting as if she's friends with Pei anyhow (although Pei clarifies them as being "not friends")
*A crisis which feels near identical to one from a prior book in the series, to make it even worse*
In a book where plot is irrelevant, and the important things are the characters, their arcs, and the themes, having a tonal conflict resolve like this just makes the whole thing not work, since there's little else left in the book other than character arcs that are a bit heartwarming, but otherwise insubstantial. If this is truly the last book in the Wayfarer series, it's a shame, because while Chambers' craft is still clearly there, her message is for once muddled to the point where it all ends not on her usual moment of heartwarming, but in disappointment.
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