Her work is obviously influenced by TV shows like Battlestar Galactica, Farscape, and Firefly, in that it trends more toward a galaxy full of rusty, beaten-up spacecraft and wisecracking opportunists than it does the gleaming ideals of the Star Trek franchise.īut where too many other sci-fi writers have taken the scuzziness of universes like Chambers’s and written stories that are similarly scuzzy, Chambers writes books about how people - and the aliens who love them - take care of each other in a world far bigger and weirder than our own.Ĭhambers’s three novels - The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (2014), A Closed and Common Orbit (2016), and Record of a Spaceborn Few (2018) - are all set in the same universe, where humanity made it out to where other intelligent species lived and soon found themselves near the bottom of the galactic political order. She’s just that good.Ĭhambers writes science fiction about far-future humans who have taken to the stars. But I read my first Chambers book in summer 2019, and I finished everything she’s written thus far by February 2020. I try to space out the works of my favorite authors to ensure I always have something to savor. I have devoured few authors’ bibliographies like I have the three novels and one novella written by Becky Chambers.
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The plight of the central character of Stoner is more obviously brutal and looks at an entire life whereas A Jest of God, which won the Governor General's Award, spans one summer. Both explore the quiet agony of the inner life of traumatised emotion and the unrelenting scrutiny of social convention. It was first published in 1966, the same year as John Williams' Stoner. Margaret Laurence's third novel, A Jest of God, is the second of her famous five-volume Manawaka sequence which study the lives of women living in Canada. No one is to blame, yet there is blame and resentment. It sounds so familiar, so sad and so true Rachel Cameron is an unmarried daughter into her 30s still living at home with a widowed mother who clings to her more as a partner than as a child. Ferguson’s sharp-eyed catastrophe postmortems debunk received wisdom (more lifeboats on the Titanic might not have made much difference) and spotlight delusional responses, from medieval flagellant rituals to the current “vague deference to ‘the science’. The book’s centerpiece is a discussion of the Covid-19 pandemic that faults Western governments for failing to contain the virus with massive testing and tracing, but also opposes lockdowns for their economic and mental health effects. Hoover Institution scholar Ferguson ( The Square and the Tower) surveys many natural and man-made catastrophes, including volcanic eruptions, plagues, the 1840s Irish potato famine, WWI, the Hindenburg disaster, and the Chernobyl nuclear accident he also mulls dystopian sci-fi novels and, provocatively, welcomes the “desirable”(because it would foster American innovation) prospect of a “new cold war” between the U.S. Incompetence, illusions, and random chance characterize the ways humans cope with disaster, according to this scattershot historical study. |