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Over the Thanksgiving Holiday I finished the Wayfinders series by Becky Chambers. I rarely write up book reviews, but actually love thinking through them (I am an English major at heart), so here it is. There are spoilers, so if you don’t like spoilers then avert your eyes!

The Wayfinders series is a trilogy written by Becky Chambers. I would call it maybe a hopeful dystopia. I realize those two words look weird together. The dystopian piece comes from the physical surroundings that humans are living in. They’re in ships and on throwaway planets that other alien life deemed too worthless to care about, so give it to the humans.

The humans are on these ships because they’ve entirely ruined Earth and made it completely unlivable. So, in search of a better future, of any future, really, they took to space.

They finally made contact with other sapient life in the galaxy and worked for years to be recognized as a sapient species, worthy of representation at the Galactic Council.

The hopeful part shines through the characters. The main characters are given rich backstories. Many come from quite horrible beginnings, but I love that Chambers doesn’t keep them in a cycle of sadness. The characters are sad, and at times deeply and irreparably sad, but they try. The don’t give in and think that things are as good as they’re going to get. They continue their work. They want to be more and better than they were before. And through her books, so shows that individual work that they go through each day.

They are lovely books and she’s taken a lot of time and care to craft non-human cultures with deep traditions and rituals and festivities that show how fun and beautiful our imagination can be.

I cried in each of these books. The first at the end, the second most of the way through the entire book, and the third in the last half. It was happy tears and sad tears and oh shit why did you do that tears. It’s a great series and I think captures humanity in a way that I think is good for us to think about. We’re not the most important, smartest, or best species. We are a single species among many. Our choices and our decisions and our actions matter, because we are nothing greater than, but also as great as, the actions that we take every single day.

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