This is a superb work from one of the genre’s rising stars.

Chambers uses the interconnections inevitable in such a small society to provide moments of both horrific pain and soaring grace, and to make it clear that those things are inextricably intermingled. Indeed, it’s never been clearer than it is. The characters are distinct and lovable, each shedding light on a different facet of the Fleet. Record of a Spaceborn Few is at least as remarkable, yet regrettably, isn’t going to win over anyone who’s been underwhelmed by these books before.

The multiple narrators and seemingly unrelated plot lines converge thematically into an intensely powerful and multifaceted meditation on time, history, change, and memory, leavened with a welcome touch of humor. To be sure, a few things do in Record of a Spaceborn Fewthere’s a tragic mishap at the outset, and an equally disastrous accident as the text progressesbut the third of Chambers’ loosely. A mother tries to deal with her daughter’s new fears after a horrific disaster a young man from a planetary colony tries to emigrate to the Fleet an alien ethnologist comes to study the Exodan ways of life. The effects of these things on the Exodan culture, which prioritizes resource conservation and does not use money, are far-reaching. Following humans’ entry into the Galactic Commons, the Exodan ships were granted a star to orbit and given a lot of new alien technology. Becky Chambers is a wonder, and I feel better. The delightful third book set in Chambers’s Galactic Commons universe (after A Close and Common Orbit) takes place in and around the Exodan Fleet, the set of generation ships in which humankind left an ecologically destroyed Earth. RECORD OF SPACEBORN FEW is just what the title says it is. PRAISE FOR RECORD OF A SPACEBORN FEW: The best speculative fiction currently being written.

Record of a spaceborn few review