Review: Record of a Spaceborn Few
Record of a Spaceborn Few is Becky Chambers again creating a character drive SF story in a richly textured world. It’s more a coming-of-age story than an adventure story, but those are adventures in their own way.
I re-read my gushing review of A Closed and Common Orbit and a lot of what I said there applies to Record as well. It’s set in a different part of her galaxy, but the same intricacy and depth is there. As many SF authors do, she creates a society based on familiar social principles pushed far enough to make things unfamiliar and uses that to talk about those principles. I find the way those ideas are explored is more thoughtful and reasonable than many more polemic versions of that setup.
Her writing remains impeccable, though I did find one chapter a little more on the nose than I was expecting. It didn’t take me out of the story, but it did jar a bit.
Strongly Recommended.