Review: The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, by Becky Chambers

[Russ Allbery]

The Galaxy, and the Ground Within
by Becky Chambers

Series:    Wayfarers #4
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Copyright: April 2021
ISBN:      0-06-293605-0
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     325

The name of the planet Gora is the Hanto word for useless. It's a
bone-dry, resource-poor planet with nothing to recommend it except that
it happened to be conveniently located between five other busy systems
and had well-established interspacial tunnels. Gora is therefore a
transit hub: a place lots of people visit for about half a day while
waiting for a departure time, but where very few people stay. It is the
interstellar equivalent of an airport.

Ouloo is a Laru, a species physically somewhat similar to a giant dog.
She is the owner of the Five-Hop One-Stop in a habitat dome on Gora,
where she lives with her child (who is not yet old enough to choose a
gender). On the day when this novel begins, she's expecting three ships
to dock: one Aeluon, one Quelin, and, to Ouloo's significant surprise
and moderate discomfort, an Akarak. But apart from that, it's a normal
day.

A normal day, that is, until maintenance work on the solar satellite
array leads to a Kessler syndrome collision cascade that destroys most
of the communication satellites and makes it unsafe to leave the
surface of the planet. Ouloo and her guests are stuck with each other
for longer than they expected.

In a typical SF novel, you would expect the characters to have to fix
the satellite cascade, or for it to be a sign of something more
nefarious. That is not the case here; the problem is handled by the
Goran authorities, the characters have no special expertise, and there
is no larger significance to the accident. Instead, the accident
functions as storm in a very old story-telling frame: three travelers
and their host and her child, trapped together by circumstance and
forced to entertain each other until they can go on their way.

Breaking from the formula, they do not do that primarily by telling
stories to each other, although the close third-person narration that
moves between the characters reveals their backgrounds over the course
of the book. Instead, a lot of this book is conversation, sometimes
prompted by Ouloo's kid Tupo (who I thought was a wonderfully-written
tween, complete with swings between curiosity and shyness, random
interests, occasionally poor impulse control, and intense but
unpredictable learning interest). That leads to some conflict (and some
emergencies), but, similar to Record of a Spaceborn Few, this is more
of a character study book than a things-happen book.

An interesting question, then, is why is this story science fiction? A
similar story could be written (and has been, many times) with human
travelers in a mundane inn or boarding house in a storm. None of the
aliens are all that alien; despite having different body shapes and
senses, you could get more variation from a group of university
students. And even more than with Chambers's other books, the advanced
technology is not the point and is described only enough to provide
some background color and a bit of characterization.

The answer, for me, is that the cognitive estrangement of non-human
characters relieves my brain of the baggage that I bring to human
characters and makes it easier for me to empathize with the characters
as individuals rather than representatives of human archetypes. With
human characters, I would be fitting them into my knowledge of history
and politics, and my reaction to each decision the characters make
would be influenced by the assumptions prompted by that background. I
enjoy the distraction of invented worlds and invented histories in part
because they're simplified compared to human histories and therefore
feel more knowable and less subtle. I'm not trying to understand the
political angle from which the author is writing or wondering if I'm
missing a reference that's important to the story.

In other words, the science fiction setting gives the narrator more
power. The story tells me the important details of the background;
there isn't some true history lurking beneath that I'm trying to ferret
out. When that's combined with interesting physical differences, I find
myself imagining what it would be like to be the various aliens, trying
to insert myself into their worlds, rather than placing them in a
historical or political context. That puts me in a curious and
empathetic mindset, and that, in turn, is the best perspective from
which to enjoy Chambers's stories.

The characters in this story don't solve any large-scale problems. They
do make life decisions, some quite significant, but only on a personal
scale. They also don't resolve all of their suspicions and
disagreements. This won't be to everyone's taste, but it's one of the
things I most enjoyed about the book: it shows a small part of the
lives of a collection of average individuals, none of whom are close to
the levers of power and none of whom are responsible for fixing their
species or galactic politics. They are responsible for their own
choices, and for how their lives touch the lives of others. They can
make the people they encounter happier or sadder, they can chose how to
be true to their own principles, and they can make hard choices without
right answers.

When I describe a mainstream fiction book that way, I often find it
depressing, but I came away from The Galaxy, and the Ground Within
feeling better about the world and more open-hearted towards other
people. I'm not sure what Chambers does to produce that reaction, so
I'm not sure if it will have the same effect on other people. Perhaps
part of it is that while there is some drama, her characters do not
seek drama for its own sake, none of the characters are villains, and
she has a way of writing sincerity that clicks with my brain.

There is a scene, about two-thirds of the way through the book, where
the characters get into a heated argument about politics, and for me
this is the moment where you will either love this book or it will not
work for you. The argument doesn't resolve anything, and yet it's one
of the most perceptive, accurate, and satisfying portrayals of a
political argument among normal people that I've seen in fiction. It's
the sort of air-clearing conversation in which every character is blunt
with both their opinion and their emotions rather than shading them for
politeness. Those positions are not necessarily sophisticated or deeply
philosophical, but they are deeply honest.

  "And you know what? I truly don't care which of them is right so
  long as it fixes everything. I don't have an... an ideology. I don't
  know the right terms to discuss these things. I don't know the
  science behind any of it. I'm sure I sound silly right now. But I
  just want everyone to get along, and to be well taken care of.
  That's it. I want everybody to be happy and I do not care how we get
  there." She exhaled, her broad nostrils flaring. "That's how I feel
  about it."

I am not Ouloo, but I think she represents far more people than fiction
normally realizes, and I found something deeply satisfying and
revealing in seeing that position presented so clearly in the midst of
a heated argument.

If you like what Chambers does, I think you will like this book. If
it's not for you, this is probably not the book that will change your
mind, although there is a bit less hand-wavy technology to distract the
people whom that distracts. The Galaxy, and the Ground Within didn't
have the emotional resonance that Record of a Spaceborn Few had for me,
or the emotional gut punch of A Closed and Common Orbit. But I loved
every moment of reading it.

This will apparently be the last novel in the Wayfarers universe, at
least for the time being. Chambers will be moving on to other settings
(starting with A Psalm for the Wild-Built).

Rating: 8 out of 10

Reviewed: 2021-08-15

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-293605-0.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>