User Profile

@rainer Yes, this! I've ended up in what is probably going to be a binge read of Wayfarers because there is something impalpable about their style and humanity. In some ways, Carl Sagan's novels get close, and the Long Earth series by Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett also explore some of the social side of sci-fi that Chambers does, but nothing I've read yet hits quite like Chambers' social sci-fi.

This is my second read of this book, but the Wayfarers series always feels like a haven in modern science fiction. The geopolitical setting of the book is as fraught as any other sci-fi novel, but the ways the characters resolve conflicts with words and empathy is, or at least feels, rare. I particularly enjoyed the development of Ohan and Corbin’s characters as they came towards a community from opposite directions.

Something I noticed on this reread, possibly tied to my own explorations, was the technology of communication. There is an ansible for instant communication, but news and other messages still travel as asynchronous packages for download and reading when the recipient wants to or can. It helped me reflect on my own use of social media and access to news, spurring a little exploration of the fediverse and RSS feeds again.

Despite an overflowing quantity of books in my ‘to read’ pile (I had to install a new bookshelf to accommodate them), this first instalment has earned Wayfarers and Chambers’ other works a place at the front of my reading queue. Next up, ‘A Closed and Common Orbit’.