Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky ChambersMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Most novels tell a story that's meant to hold together as a narrative. Not all of them. This one is several individual stories, none of them exciting heroes, nasty villains, or tragic victims. These are people more like most of us who read SF--we see tragedy, we watch the news, the general tone of society impacts us, and we try to get by in it.
But I read it anticipating that it would, at some point, turn into a story and it never did. That makes it harder to appreciate it for what it is, which is more of an ethnography, told both through an actual ethnographer (though called a reporter) and through personal stories of the people the ethnographer is writing about.
The Exodans escaped a collapsing ecosystem on Earth, and self-selected as basically an ideal communist society--everyone is guaranteed what they need to live, and everyone does what calls them. They share the work no one particularly wants (sanitation etc) as volunteers. Decisions are made collectively. Some critique this book for having an overly saccharine view of human nature, but this is a group selected for that trait. It's an examination of how that society is diversifying now that the pressure of staying alive in self-contained ships is off. They live among aliens, and among humans that chose other paths. It's bringing wealth and causing problems.
And as an exposition, it's all right, except for being not real. As a story, it's ultimately frustrating. I did finish it and wasn't sorry I did, and I even liked it a little for the view of how people *could* be if they cared for one another. I guess I'm not even surprised it got award nominations, since it is interestingly different and nested in a series where the other two books did. But it's not a space opera. Kind of the opposite.
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