Record of a Spaceborn few

Book 3 of the Wayfarer series

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Very different from the first two books in the series.

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‍The first is plot driven and focused on a group of sentients inside a ship. The second is character-driven and focused on one woman and two AIs. This third book in the four book series introduces us to a whole new cast of characters (with the exception of the sister and niece of the captain of the ship in the first book).

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The focus of this one isn’t to give us an adventure or even to follow someone's character arc. This book focuses on a theme and explores how various characters grapple with it.

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Her naked son slapped his torso with twin palms. ‘All fixed!’ Everything was all fixed! with him these days, and she had no idea where he’d picked it up from, no more so than she could figure out where his pajamas had gone.

She looked around the bed, beside it, under it, under blankets, under pillows, feeling ridiculous at being outwitted by a two-year-old who was placidly watching her with a finger up his nose.

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The major theme of this novel is Home. One character leaves his home on a planet to live on the gigantic homesteader ship Asteria, and in his desire for adventure gets into trouble. One character who’s been raised on the Asteria begins getting into trouble because he wants so desperately to get off the ship to have adventures. Other characters are an archivist, a male sex worker, an alien who visits the Asteria to write some travel blogs, and a funerary caretaker.

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Take a living person off Earth, put them in a sealed metal canister out in a vacuum, take them so far away from their planet of origin that they might not understand what a forest or an ocean is when you tell them about one – and they are still linked to that cycle. When we decompose under the right conditions, we turn into soil – something awfully like it, anyway. You see? We’re not detached from Earth. We turn into earth.

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The events and interactions that happen in this book are framed by the event that happens in the end of Book 1. It forces people to wonder about traditions that were put in place to remind humans of what it means to be living on the ground. It forces other people to wonder if they can ever feel safe living on a ship.

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Some characters long to leave the Asteria, some characters are interested and invested in the rituals and processes that have allowed humans for many generations to feel that a space-faring ship is truly their home. A few of the characters end up interacting, but that isn’t really the point.

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‘Our species doesn’t operate by reality. It operates by stories. Cities are a story. Money is a story. Space was a story, once. A king tells us a story about who we are and why we’re great, and that story is enough to make us go kill people who tell a different story. Or maybe the people kill the king because they don’t like his story and have begun to tell themselves a different one.

When our planet started dying, our species was so caught up in stories. We had thousands of stories about ourselves – that’s still true, don’t forget that for a minute – but not enough of us were looking at the reality of things. Once reality caught up with us and we started changing our stories to acknowledge it, it was too late.’

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This is about finding oneself, of finding one's place, how even when we’ve left a place it stays with us.
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As an expat who has now been away from my country longer than I lived in it, I relate so hard to so much in this book. I’m very aware of the parts of my homeland that I carry with me as I move through my life in Europe, which of the traditions and ways of thinking that I’ve kept alive and which I’ve ditched along the way.

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As characters in this book do, sometimes we have to move away from something to gain perspective before we can truly understand and appreciate it.

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In the grand tradition of siblings everywhere, Tessa wanted to kill her brother. Not permanently kill him. Just a casual spacing to get her point across, followed by a quick resurrection and a hot cup of tea.