Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers: review

3/5 stars on Goodreads

Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers

Record of a Spaceborn Few is the third in Chambers’s sci-fi series set in the same universe with loosely connected characters but no common plot. And sadly, it’s the least interesting of them. A huge disappointment even, especially after the delightful A Closed and Common Orbit, a story of an AI struggling with its identity.

The book is set on a space fleet of humans who have left the earth centuries ago and now try to maintain their traditional way of life in a universe where they’re no longer alone, and where settling on planets is a viable option. It has five point of view characters, each with their own chapters. There’s an old archivist entertaining an alien visitor, a harried mother of two, a teenager rebelling against his environment, a young woman in charge of the dead, and a young man from outside the fleet. Each character is perfectly ordinary, living a perfectly ordinary life. And that’s the problem with this book.

The characters aren’t interesting in any way. They don’t get a growth arch, or change in any way. They’re static props living their perfectly normal lives. The chapters are vignettes of their lives in various points in time, with no continuity between the chapters. There are no connections between the characters, except a couple of chance encounters that don’t really have any impact in their lives. So mostly we follow the mother putting her children to bed, the teenager testing his boundaries, and the others at their work, chapter after chapter. Nothing happens.

The book has absolutely no plot. I didn’t even know it’s possible to write a book with no plot. Nothing the characters do has any impact on the outside world, and no outside force impacts them. They just are. There’s a major event at the beginning that in normal book would’ve been the mid-point turn, with the rest of the book dealing with the aftermath. Here, it’s just another vignette with no impact whatsoever, if you don’t count a child having nightmares about it; not exactly a plot event.

Here, the mid-point turn was the death of a point of view character, an underhanded turn that destroyed what little enjoyment I had with the story, as that character was the most interesting one. And then the death didn’t affect the plot in any way. It touched the other characters briefly, they made adjustments accordingly, and went on with their lives. A huge disappointment.

In a word, the book is boring. If the aim was to show that humans are humans no matter where they live, the same could’ve been achieved with fewer chapters—and with a proper plot binding them together. The hugely original environment, the space fleet, is just a prop and an endless source of boring lectures. The characters could’ve been set anywhere, and they would’ve been the same. I don’t know why the author chose to write this book after the highly imaginative predecessors, which makes it even more disappointing than it otherwise would’ve been. The book is nominated for a Hugo Award this year, and I have to assume it’s solely because people liked the previous books so much. This one has nothing to recommend itself.