The Galaxy, and the Ground Within

Three strangers are stranded in a remote country inn by a freak snowstorm. Over the next few days of forced isolation they find commonality, mutual pleasure, deep disagreements, and a way to sit with all of those. The real journey was the friends we made along the way.

It's a cliché but it's a great narrative structure and Chambers adapts it well to sci-fi. Instead of a German, a Frenchman, and a Romani person all tended to by a Swiss caretaker and her teenage kid, we have five very alien people with their own distinct personalities and cultural backgrounds. But it's not just some silly extrapolation or caricature; the characters in this book feel unique and of their own. Chambers is an excellent writer for this kind of fiction. I understood and cared about the stories of the characters immediately.

Mostly the book was just idle amusement for me but it all comes to a strong conclusion with the final chapter for Speaker, one of the characters. The ending with her sharing the sim with her sister and feeling for the first time the loss of not having a planetary home. The emotional impact hit me hard. And then I realized the great clever writing trick, that the reason this worked so well was all the setup in the rest of the book. The backstory for the Akarak is set up well throughout the book. Her arguments with Pei set up the stakes of conflict. And her joy at sharing daily life with Roveg, Ouloo, and Tupa help motivate her epiphany about having grounded pleasures. It gave the book a lot more depth than I expected and I'm thankful for that.

I'm really curious to read Chambers writing a different kind of story now. I enjoyed A Psalm for the Wild-Built quite a bit too but in some ways it felt like the same kind of story, just in a different setting with different characters. Not that that's bad; I'll happily read such humanist sci-fi any day.