"Space belongs to you": Becky Chambers on optimistic sci-fi and ending her Wayfarers series

I first came across Becky Chambers' novel The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet shortly before it hit stores in 2015, drawn to its exciting description of the crew of an interstellar starship that's tasked with creating the lanes that make interstellar travel possible. While I expected something action-packed like Farscape or Firefly or Guardians of the Galaxy, I found something more rewarding: an intimate portrait of a close-knit crew, examining the various journeys that brought them to that particular moment in time.

Chambers earned considerable acclaim for the novel, and quickly followed up with a new novel, A Closed and Common Orbit. While that book is set in the same world, it's a leap away from her debut, picking up a couple of characters before going off and exploring their own journey — an artificial intelligence that finds itself in an android body and a young, genetically modified girl growing up in a scrapyard. 2018's Record of a Spaceborn Few is a delightful story of the lives of the last descendants of Earth struggling to maintain their aging fleet and maintaining their way of life, and in her latest and final installment of the series, The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, we meet four aliens who find themselves stuck on an interstellar pit stop, and get to know one another while they wait for a crisis to pass.

Chambers has written two shorter books as well: To Be Taught, if Fortunate, and A Psalm for the Wild-Built (due out in July). A sequel to that forthcoming book is A Prayer for the Crown-Shy is due out sometime down the road.

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