WWAC’s coverage of the 2022 Hugo Awards continues…
The planet Gora sits at a convenient intersection between worlds, and so serves as a stopping-off point for galactic travellers of sundry species. Surrounding the planet is a satellite grid governing the communications and transport that anyone visiting Gora relies upon – and once that grid hits a technological failure, the planet has become something other than a stopping-off point. It has become the place where a group of beings, representing multiple races and cultures, must work together as a single community.
The Galaxy, and the Ground Within is the fourth and final novel in Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers series, the others being The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, A Closed and Common Orbit, and Record of a Spaceborn Few. The volumes in the series are loosely-connected in terms of plot, although they share a universe, and while this fourth book does have some direct connections to its predecessors – Pei, a character from the first novel, is prominent here – it also works as a standalone story.
That said, something about the novel’s tone makes it a fitting conclusion to the sequence – a long wind-down after the past ordeals. The cyberpunk-influenced thriller aspects from earlier in the series are gone, and we are left with one last opportunity to spend time with the various alien races introduced thus far. While most space operas will have aliens, not many have the confidence in their worldbuilding (or species building) to push humans onto the sidelines.
But The Galaxy, and the Ground Within does precisely that. Homo sapiens is largely absent from much of the narrative, until a certain point when the plot turns to the news that the human species has been granted full membership of the GC (Galactic Commons). A transcribed parliamentary session – one of the news reports that periodically crop up through the novel – includes an objection to this: after all, humans destroyed their own planet, and nobody in the GC even knew the species existed until seventy-five standards ago.
With Earthlings out of the picture, we have plenty of space to meet the aliens stranded on Gora – and a fascinating group they are. Ouloo, a parent, is accompanied by her child Tupo; as per the cultural norms of their species, Tupo is not old enough to have chosen a gender and so has the neutral pronouns of xe and xyr. During the course of the story it is established that Tupo is seventeen years old, yet still an early adolescent in terms of mental development. Contrasting with Tupo is Speaker, who despite being eight years old is an adult member of her species, which has an average lifespan of 20.
Given their brief existence, Speaker’s people are expected to make the most of their time by serving as hyper-specialists in one area or another, hence their names (Speaker has a sister called Tracker). While some of the characters have lived short lives, others have picked up hard-won experiences that come in handy during the present predicament. Pei went to military school and so has some history with putting up rough-and-ready shelters; another member of the band, Roveg, is an exile from his own world and is similarly used to facing adversity.
Between then, the aliens display a wide range of morphologies, from the marsupial-like Ouloo (who has a pouch for housing Tupo) to the methane-breathing Speaker (who is forced to wear a bipedal mechanical suit so as to avoid breathing poisonous oxygen). Pei’s species meanwhile belongs to a species that communicates through colour (“She’d laughed the brightest shades at stories about his techs… He’d touched her colours as they moved”). The novel finds inventive ways to articulate this synethesia-like attribute:
‘They don’t have much in common, but there’s one thing true for all of them: we don’t have a word for family. We have lots of words for groups – sizes of groups, people who hang out together often …’ She trailed off.
‘What?’
‘I don’t know how to translate this type of … of word. I’m not sure it has a translation in Klip.’
Speaker was immediately interested; these were her favourite kinds of words. ‘What’s the gist?’
‘Moh. It’s a specific kind of noun, and it means … um …’ Ouloo frowned. ‘Gathering mood, I guess? Mood isn’t quite right. Gathering sense. Or … mmm!’ She bobbed her neck definitively as a connection was made. ‘Gathering flavour. That works.’
‘Gathering flavour,’ Speaker said, savouring the new concept.
As the alien characters navigate their differences, the novel shows a lot of humour that could accurately be described as cute. At one point the stranded travellers discuss the human invention of cheese; they are repulsed at the notion of consuming milk that has been solidified with bacteria – and even more disgusted when they realise that the humans are not even using the milk of their own species. Another sequence establishes that Pei’s species has no concept of music, leading to the inevitable pun: “She picked up a fat, keg-shaped thing she was pretty sure was a common-noun speaker, and when proper-noun Speaker did not object, Pei knew that she’d got it right.” Colour-sensitive Pei is also forced to wear monochromatic spectacles to block out uncomfortable colours, despite such accessories being “dorky as hell, the sort of thing you only wore if you were very young or very old or very fussy or never left your homeworld.”
Yet the harsh reality of the universe is never too far from the sweetness. This is brought home when the child Tupo asks awkward questions about warfare:
‘You know the part where that bad guy gets hit with a plasma cannon way up close, and he turns into a skeleton and then he explodes?’
‘Yeah,’ Pei said, not sure where this was going.
‘Could that really happen?’
Ah. That’s where it was going. ‘Absolutely not,’ Pei said.
Tupo’s neck drooped. ‘Not even maybe?’
‘Not even maybe,’ Pei said. She didn’t mind Tupo asking, per se, but she did not share the kid’s enthusiasm for this pattern of questioning. She couldn’t tell xyr that she knew precisely why a person’s skeleton would not even maybe be visible if you hit them with a plasma cannon, because then xe’d ask what a plasma cannon at short range would do instead, and that was not a detail a kid needed to be privy to. She didn’t know how to tell Tupo that vid war and real war were not the same thing at all, that it wasn’t a stylish series of heroics punctuated by kick-ass music and witty retorts.
Conflicts of various kinds run through this seemingly mellow novel. Pei is in love with a human named Ashby (a major character from earlier in the series), which places her against her race’s taboo against interspecies relationships. Roveg, meanwhile, was exiled for creating interactive fiction with a subtext that was perceived as unacceptably subversive by the powers that be, the Quelin Protectorate. Roveg’s species is crustacean-like, with a shell that at one point is used as an analogy for his people’s uncompromising culture: “The thing that held a society together, Roveg had been taught, was shared narrative. A common history, a bedrock of ethics. This was the shell that held the world together, and protected all that was soft and fragile. Turning away from your own story was to open yourself to chaos.”
In one sequence, Roveg explains to Speaker that his people’s prejudicial attitude towards outsiders can be traced back to a certain conflict, and the ensuing need for a scapegoat. The conversation leads Speaker to feel a sense of eerekere – defined as a “moment of vulnerable understanding between strangers”. However, as Roveg points out, there is a stark difference between his species’ xenophobia, and the hostility towards the outside that Speaker’s people feel as a result of having been colonised in the past.
Later, a simmering tension between Speaker and Pei boils over when the former explains that she is uncomfortable with Pei’s support for her species – the Aeluons – in a war with another race, the Rosk. “I believe you and I have differing opinions on the Rosk war,” as Speaker diplomatically puts it. This is the point at which the comfy, cozy conversations between the aliens are pushed into the background to make way for a harsher element of the story’s worldbuilding:
Pei’s eyes narrowed. She hadn’t cared what Speaker thought of her before, but now she did. ‘I’m sorry, but you’re … you’re kidding, right? Do you have any idea what’s happening out there?’
‘Not as well as you, I’m sure,’ Speaker said.
‘They’re bombing civilians,’ Pei said. ‘Whole settlements, from orbit. What possible opinion could be had about that?’
Speaker opened her palms upward in a crass approximation of what an Aeluon would do if they were trying to back down. ‘Captain, I—’
‘No, really, I want to know.’ Pei was not going to back down, and was not about to let Speaker do the same. Speaker hadn’t seen what Pei had seen. She hadn’t seen the limbs, the char, the craters where towns once stood. Differing opinions. Pei had carried the gory corpse of her crewmate – her friend – out of an alleyway on what should’ve been a safe world because of differing opinions. She’d spent two days cleaning out her mine-riddled ship – her home – because of differing opinions. No, she wouldn’t stand for this. Her cheeks seethed purple, and it had nothing to do with the kick or the hormones.
Speaker defends her position. “Nobody bombs civilians from orbit without cause. My understanding of the situation is that the Rosk believe planetary colonisation is abhorrent, and they’ll do anything to stop it from happening in their territory.” Pei responds by saying that the Rosk can do whatever they like so long as they stay on their side of the map; but who, asks Speaker, drew that map?
The argument continues into the next chapter, with perspective shifting from Pei to Speaker. But it is a third character, Outoo, who is given the final word by expressing a general sense of anguished confusion: “I don’t know much about politics, or … or borders, or whatever it is you’re fighting about. And I should know about those things, probably, because I’m sure it’s irresponsible of me to not know how everything works, but … but everything is just so much.”
As can be seen, The Galaxy, and the Ground Within has its sweetness, but it has its share of sobering moments as well, and these start to build in momentum towards the novel’s close. One of the characters turns out to be pregnant, which allows the story to explore both her individual emotions and the varied ways in which the different aliens view the concept of motherhood. Indeed, no sooner has the debate about colonialism and warfare concluded than we get another heavy plot point when one of the characters faces a serious health problem. The others rush to help – but how can they provide medical aid to a being which is, to them, completely alien?
The portrayal of truly alien intelligences is something that science fiction has long struggled with, for obvious reasons. Typically, the most an SF story can hope to achieve on this front is using its aliens as a way to articulate human conditions. It has often been pointed out that Star Trek characters like Spock and Data can be read, at least in part, as depictions of people on the autistic spectrum. The aliens in The Galaxy, and the Ground Within work in a comparable manner. Their contrasting physicalities, not to mention their different ways of viewing the world, have a clear resonance with disability and neurodivergence in the real world. Yet the novel is never so crude as to use an alien species as a direct stand-in for a segment of humanity.
As a conclusion to the Wayfarers series, and as an addition to the ranks of science fiction that explores the ground between aliens and humans, The Galaxy, and the Ground Within is a triumph.
