This book is one of my favorites ever. Both it and the sequel are amazing. My understanding is that Becky Chambers does not have any more books planned but hasn't ruled out writing more. But I really really hope we see more books. This world just calms me, the characters are wonderful and reading these books is almost like meditation for me.
It's really interesting how these books have captured my attention.
If any of you out there have similar books you'd recommend I'd love to hear about them.
> My understanding is that Becky Chambers does not have any more books planned but hasn't ruled out writing more.
Ooh, that's really sad to hear; I had assumed it would be a trilogy with the city being the last one!
If the first book typifies the climbing-the-mountain archetype (quite literally in the books case!) and the meaning crisis, the second is a great exploration of neo-luddism and being critical of new technologies effects on people (even if the technology by itself isn't bad), and I was really looking forward to her view of anti-car, utopian urbanism with a third one.
> If any of you out there have similar books you'd recommend I'd love to hear about them.
I don't know how similar they are, but someone recommended "Noor" by Nnedi Okorafor recently when I asked this same question and I really enjoyed it. It's less hopeful of a world, and less calming, but also has a lot of similarities in terms of being accepting of technology and how it can improve our lives while also being critical of its impacts on people and not just blindly using/creating it for the sake of "progress".
I was about to say the same thing! Hands of the Emperor is a 950-page fantasy doorstopper with no action, no romance, not a whole lot of throughline plot, and it's the most gripping thing I've read in years. You just want to keep watching these people live out their lives, whether or not something objectively exciting is happening. It's genuinely changed what I want out of fantasy and sci-fi.
It has a utopian vibe, like Monk and Robot. The world of Zunidh isn't perfect, but it's pretty damn good and getting better, mostly because of the determined, lifelong work of the protagonist and his friends. Kip is the most delightful bureaucrat I can recall seeing in fiction.
Goddard's other books don't always follow the same formula, though they're rarely truly grim. There's more adventure, sometimes violence but not usually large-scale violence. Some are better than others, but they're all very charming IMO.
The rest of them (particularly the Return of Fitzroy Aungersell) are also phenomenal. I started with Return (which is apparently a bad choice), and it was marvellous, even without the context of Hands.
Have you considered Nghi Vo’s singing hills cycle novella series? Produced pretty consistently, about a monk who travels and collects stories with their photographic memory bird. I always found this fantasy series comfy and lush. I also recommend the Birdverse series by R. b. Lemberg (The Four Profound Weaves novella and The Unbalancing Novel), which is all about themes of emotional connection and community.
To each their own, but I could not finish that book. Too much plodding coziness. It felt like reading something written by Cory Doctorow -- a lecture wrapped in a novel. But without any of the compelling momentum Doctorow employs to carry the allegory. Maybe it would have picked up a bit if I stuck with it, but I quickly tire of being hit on the head over and over with an author's novel-length not-so-thinly-veiled self-help message that perhaps should have been an opinion piece or short article.
> I quickly tire of being hit on the head over and over with an author's novel-length not-so-thinly-veiled self-help message that perhaps should have been an opinion piece or short article.
I liked the vibe, but I felt like it was either poorly written or my reading skills need help.
The pronouns were very confusing. The author used "they" to replace he/she, and I often couldn't tell if a sentence referred to the main character or a group.
The author isn’t doing anything systematic with “they” replacing he/she everywhere; it’s just that the main character uses “they” pronouns. For people who don’t know anyone using “they” pronouns, a book like this can be a helpful way to get used to it—much easier than encountering it for the first time in the workplace. It’s true that when there’s singular/plural ambiguity, you do have to find strategies to resolve it. Luckily they’re similar strategies to how we resolve singular/plural ambiguity when using “you.” (It would be nice if English had kept “thou” around. Alas.)
I had a similar experience when writers started using 'she' as a default pronoun. It would catch in my brain and I'd have to think about it, because it was different. I think it's fine to feel that way.
I feel like it's very easy on the internet to misunderstand discomfort and misattribute feelings.
The very real ambiguity of using singular-vs-plural "they" is something that can be commented on and discussed, and is a linguistic weakness of that pronoun's increasing popularity. The english language already has that ambiguity surrounding "you", but since the reader/listener is included in a plural "you" it's easier for them to discern singular/plural.
It's not quite the same as the catch in one's brain of encountering something that is unusual but information-complete; there can be truly ambiguous situations where the meaning of a sentence is fully changed depending on whether the author intends a singular or plural "they". Thus its use is a valid criticism one can have of a book, where understanding the author's meaning is kind of the point.
Of course, introducing that ambiguity intentionally, or getting people used to the use of singular-they and getting better at distinguishing singular-vs-plural through practice and context can itself be part of the author's point :)
It's still probably the best non-gendered singular pronoun we have in english.
Same here. As someone who went through every available golden-age SciFi book in any library near me as a kid, I think the modern crop of diversity in Science Fiction is a welcome relief. It's not all good, naturally, and it's hard to compete with that early profusion of new ideas, but it sure feels less barren.
I don't really understand the confusion, a good writer (and Chambers is one) will make it clear from context whether the "they" is plural or not, but if you're confused you might enjoy her other works which use xe/xem so "they" is always plural and you don't have to sort it out.
I really liked "Record of a Spaceborn Few", but the entire Wayfarer series is pretty good. I think technically it's a sequel to the first one, but IIRC it doesn't really matter which order you read them in, you may just not be sure once or twice when they mention one of the main characters from the original book.
Thanks for taking the time to make a suggestion! I just bought "The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet" as I don't like to read series out of sequence and Kindle noted it as the first of that series.
The reason you were confused is that pronouns, correctly used, can somewhat help de-obfuscate which person is the subject, which is the object, and so on.
Imagine you have a man, another man, and a woman.
"He hit her" tells you the subject and helps narrow down who was doing the hitting, and that there was one witness. "She hit him" tells you who did the hitting and narrows down who was hit, and that there was one witness.
"It hit it" (using "it" as a pronoun, Blindsight-style, as well as others) only lets you know that hitting has happened and that one person was a witness.
"They hit them" tells you that hitting has occurred. No indication if it was a group thing or not, if there was an uninvolved witness.
Do you also get confused when more than one male character exists in a scene and the pronoun "he" exists? Genuinely curious because I didn't notice the Psalm Of The Wild-Built used any different techniques to disambiguate singular and plural they vs when there are two men. Usually, it goes "name did x. afterwards, they did y", so even if something like "joseph punched james in the mouth. he felt the crunching of teeth against his fist" makes sense to me!
It often did not disambiguate, or did so in a way that was subtle and required effort on the readers part. To reuse your example, sentences like this seemed to be common:
"Joseph, James, and Joe were in the store. They punched James and could feel the crunching of teeth against their fist."
Who did the punching in that sentence? My first thought is that both Joseph and James punched Joe, because "they" is usually plural when you have a group present. A reader might be able to determine it from further context, but it takes more effort and pulls them out of the otherwise excellent story.
It probably didn't help matters that the protagonist (Dex?) did not explain they were without gender until somewhere around the 3rd chapter. By that point I just thought the authors native language wasn't English.
> "Joseph, James, and Joe were in the store. They punched James and could feel the crunching of teeth against their fist."
I don't find this confusing in this context because, presumably, you know only one of those three use they/them pronouns (probably joe, because I called james and joseph men earlier), and only one fist is being used.
Dex couldn’t pinpoint where the affinity had come from. [...]They’d never lived anywhere with cricket song, yet once they registered its absence in the City’s soundscape, it couldn’t be ignored. They noted it while they tended the Meadow Den Monastery’s rooftop garden, as was their vocation. [...] Oh, there were plenty of bugs—butterflies and spiders and beetles galore, all happy little synanthropes whose ancestors had decided the City was preferable to the chaotic fields beyond its border walls. But none of these creatures chirped. None of them sang. They were city bugs and therefore, by Dex’s estimation, inadequate.
This paragraph uses 'they' to refer to Dex, and also 'they' to refer to insects. But it's very clear to me that the first several "they" refers to Dex, because Dex is the only subject before this. The sole "they" that doesn't refer to Dex explicitly uses "Dex" separately, so you know there isn't ambiguity there.
Genuinely asking... what's confusing about this? Chambers is using literally what people use when there's more than one guy in a scene- one pronoun usually referring to the subject just spoken about, and if two subjects exist with the same pronoun then the most recently spoken subject gets the pronoun and the other is explicitly named.
Later on...
“Okay,” Sister Mara said, for her duties as Keeper were simply to oversee, not to dictate. [...] If Sister Mara knew what was up with the monks under their shared roof, her job was satisfied. “Do you want an apprenticeship?”
“No,” Dex said. Formal study had its place, but they’d done that before, and learning by doing was an equally valid path. “I want to self-teach.”
The "they" that doesn't refer to Dex is literally called a shared roof. It obviously doesn't refer to Dex as an individual. This isn't ambiguous.
I actually find your second example confusing and ambiguous.
>“No,” Dex said. Formal study had its place, but they’d done that before, and learning by doing was an equally valid path. “I want to self-teach.”
Who is the "they" here? Remember that we haven't been told that Dex is a genderless person yet. Which means "they" probably means more than one person. My first guess would be that he and Sister Mara had studied together in the past.
Other guesses, some of which I entertained while reading the book, would be that Dex is either reminiscing about the people they went to school with, has multiple personality disorder, is part of a hive mind, or the author is just bad at the English language.
They idea that Dex is genderless and using "they" to deal with that didn't even occur to me until much later.
Did you know that "you" used to only be used in plural? I imagine the transition period to singular/plural was also confusing to readers.
> Who is the "they" here? Remember that we haven't been told that Dex is a genderless person yet. Which means "they" probably means more than one person.
Dex's relationship with gender is unambiguous-- before that sentence are multiple paragraphs where Dex is referred to exclusively with "they" and "they" refers only to Dex. We don't need to be told Sister Mara is a woman, she is just called she. This is an unreasonable standard that doesn't apply to any other pronoun.
> They idea that Dex is genderless and using "they" to deal with that didn't even occur to me until much later.
I can even tell this "they" you use in the beginning is a typo or something due to the grammatical structure of the sentence. Are you sure the writer's mastery of English is the problem, here? Or maybe you're just personally unfamiliar with third person singular pronouns, and fall under the category of another commenter who admitted that their first experience with "she" protagonists felt different? (btw, is it ambiguous which "they" is being referred to there?)
> >“No,” Dex said. Formal study had its place, but they’d done that before, and learning by doing was an equally valid path. “I want to self-teach.”
Does the "they'd" in the above sentence mean Dex, or the plural of Sister Mara and Dex, or some other grouping of x + Dex? Normally it would mean a group, but in this case we can no longer be certain since Dex alone is considered a "They".
As far as I can tell there is literally no way to determine that without asking the author directly.
As I said above, it could just be me. I'm not an English professor, and don't claim to be. The extra "y" was a typo.
>Does the "they'd" in the above sentence mean Dex, or the plural of Sister Mara and Dex, or some other grouping of x + Dex?
It very clearly refers to Dex, because Dex is the subject of the sentence prior and there's no indication of a shared experience. It literally follows that Dex is denying something, and the sentence follows the structure of the very same denial ("X, but Y"). It's really not ambiguous at all. If it was ambiguous to refer to Dex as "they" there because "they" can refer to multiple people, you must hate if this scene had Dex use "she" when Sister Mara exists in the same conversation.
The first thing Ada Cirillo noticed on the way to her girlfriend’s family’s Christmas Eve party was the way Lil looked out the window. Usually Lil was the talkative type, the beak that broke through Ada’s shell and hurled her out to experience the world.
But as they drove through the limestone-blasted roadways of Missouri toward Saint Charles, where Lil’s parents resided, Lil was quiet. Distant. She didn’t rest her hand on Ada’s knee as Ada drove through the light crust of snow on the highway. Instead, both hands knotted together in her lap.
It's the exact same techniques that Becky Chambers is using here. Or do you just genuinely have difficulty with pronouns as a grammatical concept?
I don't think that it's clear at all, but I suppose that's subjective. To me it's much more difficult to parse and got in the way of my enjoyment of an otherwise excellent book.
I'd have much preferred "new" pronouns like xe/xer/xem. I've read thousands of books, and changing an old word to mean new things (but only under specific circumstances) is much more difficult for me than learning a new word.
The Chicago Style guide is much the same. I don't think either mean's to say that it automatically becomes less confusing when gender diversity is involved, it's just that we don't have better options.
It's sci-fi. If we're imaging a better future, can't we also imagine some new pronouns that don't confuse people?
Just for giggles I asked Bing It also thinks that sentence refers to Dex and another person.
>Hello, this is Bing. I can help you with your question.
The word “they’d” is a contraction of either “they had” or “they would”. In this sentence, it means “they had”. It refers to the subject of the previous clause, which is Dex and an implied other person. The sentence implies that Dex and someone else had done formal study before, but now Dex wants to self-teach.
On the other hand, it's /very/ short. Wasn't totally my cup of tea (picked it up because I LOVED her "Wayfarers" books -- /The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet/ and the two sequels) but I finished it in just one cup of tea.
You're right! I just misspoke. Also, honestly, /The Galaxy and the Ground Within/ is IMO the least compelling of the series, but I'm more of a "space opera" fan and thus wasn't crazy about the calm, contemplative, almost-nothing-is-happening tone of it. Now that I analyze it this way, they kind of trend in that direction, with the Monk and Robot books being even more that way and /Angry Planet/ being almost pure space opera.
It's pleasant and cosy, sure. I didn't feel it had or needed a "message"; it felt more like an "Iyashikei" (or "Cute Girls Doing Cute Things") story. (Interesting how those have come to be perceived as somewhat alt-right aligned, whereas Chambers is coming from the other side politically).
This has a lot of overlap with the volunteer work I do. It's a charity for people with autism
Once or twice a month me and a colleague gather and a couple of people are invited to talk about themselves, their lives and usually their problems. We have no professional experience, the only requirement is that you're "familiar" in some sense with the problems and/or life of people with autism.
Practically all we do is listen, and guide the conversation when it doesn't flow naturally. We're not bound by any therapeutical distance guidelines, we're allowed to become friends with visitors if it makes sense or if we wish to do so.
It is in a group setting, so it's not one-on-one like the tea monk. We do serve (very basic!) tea and coffee though.
Most of the time, visitors leave feeling better :)
Oh, this is good, I was delighted when a friend recommended these books to me. My quiet semi-retirement plan is to take up tea selling, modeled after Dex and some other tea monks.
There's a poet by the name of Baisao, the old tea seller. In Norman Waddell's translation, subtitled Life and Zen Poetry in 18th Century Kyoto you'll find this poem:
Set up shop this time
on the banks of the Kamo
customers, sitting idly
forget host and guest
their long sleep ends
awakened, they realize
they're the same as before.
Anyway, I have a pack list for a tea shop that fits in a bike pannier, and my other pannier can hold water :) My plan for the first sunny day of spring is to park my car at one end of town and have my partner drop me and my bike off at the other end of town, and set up wherever seems nice while I ride back to my car, stopping at stores for water and snacks along the way.
So glad this was posted. I have never heard of this author, and literally just now at this moment I was looking for something like this. Some real life serendipity . Then went down the rabbit hole of checking out the author and her other books. This seems so under the radar.
Could use some hopepunk
From Wired article:
"" Chambers’ name has come to be associated with a specific type of science fiction. It’s known, cutesily and somewhat oxymoronically, as hopepunk. ""
she's extremely popular in some circles! my favourites are "record of a spaceborn few" and "a closed and common orbit" (which really should have won awards) but everything she has written is great.
When I wrote this article I would have never expected anyone beyond a few friends to notice it. My blog has been mainly a place for me to think through ideas I'm interested in by writing about them.
I love the book recommendations. I'll share them with our local Utopian book collective. For those interested in positive sci-fi futures ... The club has a blog here - https://justutopias.com/just-utopias-blog/
It's really interesting how these books have captured my attention.
If any of you out there have similar books you'd recommend I'd love to hear about them.