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Reverse Engineering the Future: Becky Chambers on Record of a Spaceborn Few
Ships in 1-2 days.
Record of a Spaceborn Few is the third in Becky Chambers’ cheerful and affecting Wayfarers series. The Arthur C. Clarke shortlisted first novel, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, follows a young woman fleeing Mars to become a clerk on the deep space tunneling ship Wayfarer. While the ship has a human captain, the crew is made up of wide variety of aliens, and indeed, in this universe, humans are junior members of the Galactic Commons, scattered by a diaspora from a dying Earth, and not particularly technologically advanced.
The first book focuses largely on the interpersonal relationships of the Wayfarer‘s crew. While they may be caught up in galactic events at points, their lives and loves are well more important than flashy deeds. It is a road trip novel of sorts, with multiple point of view characters, interacting across many disparate cultures and species. It is an intensely humane and positive novel, even while it acknowledges the darkness.
Sequel A Closed and Common Orbit Orbit, by contrast, feels much more intensely personal. There are only two point of view characters—both of whom we met, briefly, in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet—and the novel follows one character in detail from childhood to present day. Record of a Spaceborn Few returns to the wider view, following more than a half dozen characters on and around the Exodus fleet. The Exodans are the largest concentration of humanity anywhere in the universe; they are the descendants of those who left a poisoned Earth two centuries before on a flotilla of hope.
Upon the release of the third entry in the ongoing series, we talk with Becky about putting the science in her sci-fi, navigating the far reaches of publishing, and finding a light in the darkness.
Ships in 1-2 days.
While none of the books in the Wayfarers series are hard science fiction, there is still a fair amount of invented technology. Both Pepper from A Closed and Common Orbit and Tessa from Record of a Spaceborn Few work in salvage, for example, and their work lives are fairly detailed, and the crew of the Wayfarer perpetrates some serious physics. Where do you get your science for the fiction?
On the science side, I try to keep things accessible for readers who maybe don’t have much STEM knowledge, but I still make an effort to base things in real science. The laws of nature are pretty close to the real thing in these books, even though I take plenty of creative leaps. When I need to discuss something specific—wormholes, for example—I’ll do some proper research on my own (that can be anything from internet articles to books to educational shows), then simplify it back into the story. I used to work as a technical writer, and that experience is helpful in this regard. Take a complex idea, make it user-friendly. I use a similar approach with imaginary tech, too. I focus much more on what a gadget does for the user, rather than the nitty-gritty of how it works. Most people in the here-and-now don’t know how their everyday tech works. I think that would hold true in the future, too.
Many of the characters in this book feel really close to home, from the exhausted mother trying to get her kids to bed, to the teenagers getting busted using fake IDs. Bearing in mind that of course you don’t live on a flotilla of spaceships, are your characters based on real people? On personal experience?
I like to compare writing a book to making dinner out of whatever leftovers you have in the fridge. Ideas come from anywhere and everywhere, and that extends to characters, too. Everything from close friends to things I heard passing strangers say. I spend a lot of time listening to background chatter, creepy as that may sound. It helps me break out of my own little bubble, especially when it comes to writing characters that aren’t like me. I don’t have kids, for example, and I never got caught using a fake ID. But do I have people in my life who do and did? Totally.
The Exodan fleet is the focus of the new novel: all of the characters’ lives intersect in some way with the culture, politics, and physical workings of that collection of ships. How did you develop the Exodan culture and government?
This was all about reverse engineering. We already know a handful of things about the Fleet from the previous books. We know they survived, and that they’re still out there. We know the ships are old. We know Ashby, our born-and-raised Exodan with his unshakeable pacifism and community-oriented mindset. We know the Wayfarer—which, while built and maintained by people of many cultures, still has an Exodan captain who is going to ask for and expect certain things. So I worked backwards from all those tidbits, and coupled them with the fact that the Exodus Fleet was successful. They made it. Their ships didn’t fail. Their culture didn’t break down into class war or ideological factions. So much of writing this book was just asking myself how they managed that, with the directive that it whatever that model was, it had to be something positive. There are dark means to achieving those ends, too, but that’s not my style.
While this latest is probably the most human-centric of the three novels, these humans still exist in universe with many sentient alien species and machine intelligences. How do you go about designing your aliens? Your AIs?
The guiding rule with aliens and AI alike is that human beings are not the default for the universe—not physically, not culturally, not in terms of perception. They have to be similar enough to talk and connect with human characters (these would be very different books otherwise), but they should feel “other.”
With aliens, I usually start with non-primate animals. I’m particular to bugs and deep-sea creatures, but I can start from anywhere. I pick traits that interest me, then expand them to the extreme of sapient civilization. With AI, I’m usually working off of my base-level understanding of how code and computers function. I can’t shake my own human experience, but I do my best to put myself in their shoes.
Ships in 1-2 days.
There’s a lot of history in the Wayfarers series, both for the last few space-faring centuries of humanity, and the larger history of the Galactic Commons. We learn a lot more about humanity’s history in Record of a Spaceborn Few, but there has to be more backstory we’re not privy to (yet?). How do you go about envisioning the history of the Galactic Commons? Of humanity?
I have a locally-hosted wiki with all my lore notes. It’s way more than I’ll ever be able to use, but it helps me keep track of things. I’ve been working on it for around 12 years now, and I can’t think of any point at which I spent long periods of time hashing things out. It’s always been done in little pieces here and there. Ideas I get in the shower or on a plane, afternoons when I’m fired up about evolution or sociology or something. That kind of thing.
It’s hard for me to say how I go about it, because it’s such a hodgepodge process. I can say that the core concept for humanity, at least, is one in which the mainstream has eaten an enormous dose of humble pie. We recognize our simultaneous uniqueness and insignificance in the galaxy, as well as our fragility. I really believe that mindset is the only thing that will enable us to make decisions that benefit our species in the long term. I express that in the human cultures I’ve made up (the successful ones, at least). Exodans especially.
One of the things I enjoy about the Wayfarers series is how thoughtful and humane the characters are. Though their lives are not without real conflict, heartbreak, or struggle, the people we encounter live careful, considered lives. It feels like a callback to the idealism of early Star Trek—but without the cultural baggage of the time—or some of Le Guin’s ambiguous utopias. But I feel like the ascendant form in science fiction is the dystopia and a more grimdark view of humanity. Can you talk a little about writing against the grain?
It makes total sense that grimdark and dystopia are at the forefront right now. Art always reflects the time in which it’s made, and right now, our species is dealing with some big, scary stuff. Politics are a mess. The environment is a mess. It’s understandable that we’re not feeling great about the future right now. And I think it’s healthy to express that fear through grimdark, I really do. We need to get that off our chests, and we definitely need cautionary tales.
But at the same time, you have to balance it out. If all you see in the future is struggle and hardship, then there’s not much point in doing anything. What I write is the stuff that happens after the struggle. That’s not to say that nothing bad or difficult ever happens in my books. In order to properly write about hope, you have to address the rough stuff, too. Ultimately, though, I want my books to feel like a good future, something you might want to be part of and work toward. I want you to believe that there’s something beyond dystopia worth fighting for.
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet was originally self-published, after a successful Kickstarter. The next two novels have been written under a traditional publisher. How has that change affected your work? What do you like particularly about either model: self-publishing or traditional?
The biggest change is that I write fiction full-time now, which I’m not sure I could’ve achieved on my own. In order to be successful in self-publishing, you have to rock at self-promotion, and that has never been my strong suit. And that right there is the big difference between the two models. I don’t see one as better than the other. They’re both great options, with their own pros and cons. If all you want to do is write, and you like the idea of having a dedicated team deal with all the marketing and distribution and legal stuff, then traditional publishing is the best fit. But if you want to have full control over absolutely every aspect of publishing, if you like the idea of wearing a dozen different hats and being your own machine, then self-publishing is awesome.
In a very general sense, self-publishing has more freedom, traditional publishing has more support. The latter is a better fit for me, but that’s not true for everybody. And even so, I may self-publish again in the future, if I have a project that’s well-suited to it. Lots of authors do both, and I think that’s great.
The universe of the Galactic Commons is a large universe, full of a panoply of aliens, and centuries of history. Do you intend to keep writing in this universe? Is the next volume formulating? And will we return to Earth at some point? (I’m semi-obsessed with the survivalists still eking out a living on humanity’s homeworld.)
I do have plans to keep writing in this universe, yes. I’m taking a little break from it this year, just to cleanse the palate, but I’ll be back soon. There are lots more corners of the galaxy I’d like to explore. Earth’s probably the thing I’m most on the fence about. Ask me again in a year or two.