Becky Chambers’s Wayfarers novels are the positive narrative about our future that we need
Recently I finished reading the Wayfarer novels by Becky Chambers. The series consists of three loosely connected novels set in the same future interstellar society. In this vision of the future, humanity lives across many worlds and some people even live permanently in space in the Exodus Fleet. Humans have also made contact with many other species and are part of a wider galactic community of different civilizations.
The three novels have stories that take place in different parts of the galaxy. The first, The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet, follows the Wayfarer, a ship that makes wormholes that connect the galaxy up. The second, A Closed And Common Orbit, tells two stories about the youth and adulthood of a friend of a crewmate from the Wayfarer and the third, A Record of A Spaceborn Few, follows the sister of A Wayfarer crew member who lives in The Exodus Fleet, a permanent residence for humans in space. Across these three stories we see a wide range of how people live in this universe, all of which is vividly brought to life by Chambers’s imagination.
My main take away from reading these three books is that this is an optimistic vision of the future. This isn’t a utopia, like The Culture in Iain M. Banks’s sci-fi novels, but it’s certainly a more socially just future. By and large, there is peace and prosperity. Even in the resource-poor Exodus Fleet, everyone is provided with a basic standard of living.
A future where we live together in space
This is a future where humans and aliens share ships, living space and work together. The Wayfarer itself has a human and non-human crew and a few awkward moments aside (such as when the ship’s Aandrisks crew member is in a bad mood because she needs to shed her scales) everyone gets along fine. There are wide differences between a human and a Harmagian (a gooey mollusk like creature) and people are tolerant and accepting of the differences. There are rivalries between species, struggles for power and competing views of how we should relate to each other. There are wars, fought by the Aeluon commandos and dangerous pariah species such as the Toremi from the first novel, however, huge interspecies war (the kind we are accustomed too from sci-fi novels) seems rare, and sectarian violence doesn’t seem to exist at all.
In the first novel, aliens and humans share a ship and establish deep bonds leading to a found family. The second novel explores the interpersonal relationships between humans and AIs. In the third novel, despite being set in the predominantly human Exdos Fleet, has a plot line in which a curious Harmagian is accepted into human society.
As well as this being a vision of the future where different species can live together, it’s a future where humans can live with each other. There are cultural differences between the Exodus Fleet and non-fleet humans, however, there is little hostility between the two. The human race of this future is also accepting of LGBTQ+ people, tolerant of people with different gender identities and radical strife seems to be a thing of the past. These novels show that humans can live together without hate.
This is a story we need now
After reading these novels I felt that this is a story that we need now: a story about people can live together, if not in perfect harmony, but at least peacefully. Not just people as vastly different as humans and Aandrisks or Harmagians or Sianat Pairs or AIs but people who are similar to each other but have a different skin tones or religions.
In today’s fiction, there is a prevalence for dystopias and visions of disastrous futures where the few surviving humans eke out a pitiless existence either under the yoke of authoritarianism like in The Hunger Games, or in a climate devastated wasteland such as Mad Max: Fury Road. I can understand why visions of a dark future appeal. We are worried about the present and fearful about our future. Grim warnings about how bad things can get might jerk us into action or at least show us that we are not alone in being frightened about the future. However, taken together too many grim visions of tomorrow can lead us to believe that destruction and tyranny are inevitable and there is nothing we can do about it.
Narratives about how we can't live together
There are also too many narratives about how we cannot live together. Stories in the news, from immigration to trans rights, are telling us that an inevitable consequence of humans being different from each other is strife between us. Stories about crime or civil disharmony say that human beings are always at each other’s throats. These contribute to a greater story about how we cannot tolerate each other. If we’re not careful, we’ll end up thinking that humans can’t live together and our future is just a slide into increasingly more fraught strife until we destroy each other.
The future is yet to be written and we can change it. That’s why we need narratives about hope, narratives about how we can live together in peace and tolerance, to show that it’s possible. We need stories and fiction that show us that we can tackle the deep divisions in society and live together. It won’t be easy and what we end up with won’t be perfect, but if we believe we’re not capable of anything better we won’t amount to anything better.
The Wayfarers novels give us a glimpse of a better, more tolerant future where people can live together as peacefully as their circumstances allow. We need stories like this to save us from our fear of each other in the present and our visions of grime dystopian futures that could easily go from stark warnings to the inevitable fate of us all.
