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best 4 last
Dec. 24th, 2025 05:02 pmmerry holiday to anyone celebrating and merry wednesday to anyone who isn't! i have made it through a series! after long last! i read the last wayfarers book, the galaxy and the ground within!
honestly this may have been my favourite of the four. it has less plot than book 2 - and i know lack of plot/stakes was my primary complaint about the first and third books, i know - but there is that lasting tension of, what are all these characters hiding? is speaker's sister alive? what will pei decide about her relationship? when will the station's operations resume? etc, etc. so like it felt like there was stuff going on and chambers didn't just immediately spit out a bunch of facts and go "here's my world, look at it!".
a thing i thought this book did well: the akarak! and more broadly, the idea of what does it mean to be othered? to be exiled, or to choose to live separate, or to go outside of your traditional cultural norms? but especially the way the conflict between speaker and pei was handled and also? chambers noting that many akarak kids are born disabled in some way because of the conditions they were conceived in. that's interesting to me as we know from displaced/disenfranchised human populations that yeah, that's some bad shit that can happen! that's what happens when you destroy somebody's home!
a thing i thought this book did less well: pei's whole deal. i didn't feel like you needed to have read book 1/be familiar with ashby to understand what was going on here, which is good, but - and maybe my perspective is shaded by the fact that i'm someone who does want children - but what it means to choose to not be a parent is different on a species level? like because the aeluons reproduce so differently i'm not sure that the comparison and moral chambers is trying to draw here actually resonates. and honestly the way that it's framed - hanging around humans makes pei more human, therefore, she doesn't have to reproduce - makes it seem like oh yeah, human behaviour and human morals actually is the gold standard for this society, which i'm less than about. i wish there had been maybe a more culturally specific reason for pei to not want to mate. but again i want kids so maybe that's just me
honestly this may have been my favourite of the four. it has less plot than book 2 - and i know lack of plot/stakes was my primary complaint about the first and third books, i know - but there is that lasting tension of, what are all these characters hiding? is speaker's sister alive? what will pei decide about her relationship? when will the station's operations resume? etc, etc. so like it felt like there was stuff going on and chambers didn't just immediately spit out a bunch of facts and go "here's my world, look at it!".
a thing i thought this book did well: the akarak! and more broadly, the idea of what does it mean to be othered? to be exiled, or to choose to live separate, or to go outside of your traditional cultural norms? but especially the way the conflict between speaker and pei was handled and also? chambers noting that many akarak kids are born disabled in some way because of the conditions they were conceived in. that's interesting to me as we know from displaced/disenfranchised human populations that yeah, that's some bad shit that can happen! that's what happens when you destroy somebody's home!
a thing i thought this book did less well: pei's whole deal. i didn't feel like you needed to have read book 1/be familiar with ashby to understand what was going on here, which is good, but - and maybe my perspective is shaded by the fact that i'm someone who does want children - but what it means to choose to not be a parent is different on a species level? like because the aeluons reproduce so differently i'm not sure that the comparison and moral chambers is trying to draw here actually resonates. and honestly the way that it's framed - hanging around humans makes pei more human, therefore, she doesn't have to reproduce - makes it seem like oh yeah, human behaviour and human morals actually is the gold standard for this society, which i'm less than about. i wish there had been maybe a more culturally specific reason for pei to not want to mate. but again i want kids so maybe that's just me
