Book Review: The Galaxy, And The Ground Within
If you had asked me to list out my most anticipated books of 2021, The Galaxy, And The Ground Within certainly would have made the list. Becky Chambers’ previous Wayfarers books have been an utter delight, and have consistently made me cry at their emotional highpoints. I dove into this one almost immediately upon release, and I am pleased to say that the last Wayfarers book is just as good as its predecessors.
The Five-Hop One-Stop is a stellar truck stop, located in a system no one would otherwise care about if it didn’t contain so many travel lanes. On a day like any other, its Laru proprietor Ouloo and her child Tupo welcome visitors: a Quelin, an Aeluon, and an Akarak. But when the satellite system around the planet experiences a catastrophic failure, these five very different beings are forced to interact and come together to help each other in a time of trouble.
First things first: this is a Becky Chambers book. If you’re here for the plot, you’re going to be disappointed. There isn’t much of one, just like there wasn’t much of one in any of the previous Wayfarer books. That’s never stopped Chambers before though, and she’s at the top of her game here.
This is the first Wayfarers book with no Human main characters at all (and only one very minor Human character at the end), and so it behooves me to once again state how well Chambers handles writing believable aliens. Her worldbuilding work has been evident before, but is even more evident here, especially as we focus on some alien species (the Laru and the Akarak in particular) that have not received much airtime in previous books. Everything from physiology to culture is considered, and it’s a driver for a lot of the conversations between the various characters.
Another area Chambers consistently excels at is character development and character arcs; it will surprise no regular reader of her work when I say that the character arcs here are heartbreakingly and exquisitely rendered, in particular the arcs for the three visitors to the Five-Hop.
Roveg is a Quelin, an insectile race that is fairly insular and not especially friendly to the other member species of the GC. Roveg himself, however, is an exile — forced to live offworld and forbidden to return due to his prior expression of non-traditional viewpoints. Roveg has a very important appointment to keep, an appointment that he absolutely cannot miss.
Speaker is an Akarak, a member of a rare species that cannot breathe oxygen and so must wear a suit when outside her own ship. Her species is also not especially well thought of in the GC, and she chooses to be a representative for her people, with all the benefits and downsides that carries with it. Her arc, then, is about acceptance and the work of building friendships and relationships with people who are utterly unlike you, a microcosm of the book’s larger theme.
And then there’s Pei. Pei will be familiar to reads of previous Wayfarers books; she is Ashby’s secret Aeluon lover, and we know how difficult keeping that secret has been for them, and how tired they are becoming of keeping it. We catch Pei here on her way to visit Ashby on his ship, ready for a nice long vacation with the man she loves. But while stuck on-planet, a massive biological complication will cause her to question what she really wants in life.
I don’t normally do spoilers, but I’m going to give a quick warning here so I can discuss Pei’s arc. Skip the next paragraph if you don’t want to see the spoilers!
Pei realizes about halfway through that she is going through shimmer, the one time an Aeluon woman produces an egg. The egg must then be fertilized or it will break down in her body, the opportunity to have a child lost. Pei immediately struggles with this, because a) detouring to ensure her egg is fertilizing will mean not seeing Ashby like she planned and b) she’s honestly just not sure it’s what she wants. Yet there is a tremendous pressure to go through with the shimmer that comes from her culture. After all this dilemma, there’s a moment toward the end where Speaker crystallizes it for Pei: You don’t want to. That’s it. That is all it ever needs to be. As someone who is childfree by choice and who has dealt with people telling her “you’ll change your mind,” etc., this moment hit me incredibly hard. Pei is more than her choice to become a mother, and the decision is hers alone.
OK, y’all can come back now.
The resolutions of each of these arcs are exquisite; the end of Roveg’s made me cry, and the end of Speaker’s had me sobbing so much I could barely read the page anymore. There is just something so deeply human about Chambers’ work in this series, such an optimistic and hopeful take on the world. It doesn’t matter how different we are; we’re still the same. We still want the same things, and when we work together, we are greater than the sum of our parts.
It’s such an important message for a world that is so deeply divided today; maybe that’s why these books always make me cry. But I honestly can’t think of a better way to wrap up this series, and I’ll be revisiting this book again and again, I’m sure.
Grade: 5/5 stars
Memorable Quote:
“The only consistency we have had from you is the word no. The only matter in which the GC has proven itself constant is in explaining to us why the things we ask for are impossible. And yet, elsewhere, you have proved yourselves extremely capable of creating possibilities. We have all seen the news about the Human species being granted full GC membership. The Human species, which destroyed its own world and which no one in the GC knew existed seventy-five standards ago. You will grant them full rights. You will give them a star to park their ships around. You will allow them to build colonies. When we expressed our outrage about this, we were told that the circumstances were so very different with them. Humans breathe the same air you do. Their ways were easier for you to understand. They don’t die in the middle of political talks.
How convenient for you, to at last work with a species whose bodies are compatible with your bureaucracy.”
