Record of a Spaceborn Few is the latest (but not the last!) in Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers series. It follows a handful of humans as they struggle with questions of mortality, community, relationships, home and life beyond the horizons of what we call home.
The lives of the characters interweave loosely in this one, and only touch on the events of the previous two novels, such that initially I found myself hoping characters from the previous books would show up in this new context. But it wasn’t long until I fell in love with the new characters as well: as multilayered, flawed and vulnerable as any of Chambers’ protagonists.
The story, too, takes place largely on a single space station – a tiny geographic area considering the previous two books literally spanned planets. And it’s this limited scale that ironically brings brings home just how expansive and intricate the world of Wayfarers really is. As loosely as the stories told in this book lace into the previous ones, this is unequivocally a Wayfarers novel: it’s told in Chambers’ earnest, “up-lit” style storytelling that is uplifting but never saccharine, and the scale of the story feels utterly organic.
This scale was one of my favourite things about the book. Rather than culminate in a giant dramatic space gunfight, as is the wont of so many books these days, the conclusion to Record of a Spaceborn Few is much more introspective. The biggest, most violent event in the book occurs in the prologue, and sets in motion expanding ripples of internal development for each of the point of view characters. The individual plot arcs are all internal, and the conflicts grow out of what the characters themselves find important and difficult: human connection, community, home, individual fears rooted in past trauma.
This may be a different kind of storytelling than today’s readers are used to, recalling the stories of Ursula le Guin more than, say, Star Wars or Star Trek, but it is, I think, a necessary one. So often the sci fi stories we are told are so wrapped up in large-scale conflicts, wars, ecological disasters, planetary destruction, and so obsessed with glorifying imaginative technology and flashy effects, that we lose sight of the human struggle, the everyday detail and collateral damage of the progress humanity has made in these tales. But these stories, for me, are the more interesting ones.
Record of a Spaceborn Few tells a small story rooted indelibly in a larger world and a collective invented history spanning generations. Chambers once again proves herself a keen student of language and culture, deftly and tenderly portraying the complex and often fraught relationships between her characters, in a book that left me feeling deeply contemplative and ultimately hopeful.
Self-Indulgent Travel Journal: Edinburgh to Tampa 1
5.38 am.
Yesterday I could feel the beginnings of something, a change of state, as I wandered town, picking up last minute gifts for friends back home, dithering about what to make for dinner. I felt my mind begin to relax, in the absence of stress about travel and in the presence of an affirmation, in the form of an acceptance to something I’d really wanted that came through this week, I felt buoyant, hopeful and creative. At the outset of a month-long holiday I felt capable of higher forms of thought in a way I hadn’t been while working full time.
Now in the midst of this change of state I’m attempting to affect another one. Moving from sleep to wakefulness has never been difficult for me, though the reverse has never been true. So I’m surprised to find that I feel almost human as I sit in bed (to which I have returned) fully clothed, waiting to leave the flat.
That being said I can think of little else to say but what I’ve already written, and I hope I get some sleep on the plane.
F, M or OTHER: Quarrels with the Gender Binary
Hey folks!
I’m posting today from snowy Edinburgh about a new book that I’m really excited to be contributing to: Knight Errant Press‘s anthology F, M or OTHER: Quarrels with the Gender Binary. It’s a crowdfunded collection of essays, poetry and short stories meant to challenge the rigid boundaries between our society’s gender categories, and open up a dialogue about what it means to be male, female, both or neither, and you can tell just from the title that this is my kind of thing.
a beautiful print by illustrator Allolune/Alice Carnegie – available as part of our UNICORN BUNDLE
My piece in the anthology is a short science fiction story called The Archivist – about a genderless person who, after being severely injured, is forced to leave the job and home they were raised in and live in the world outside, a world where binary gender is still the norm. I was so excited to be asked to contribute to this book, and even more pleased when the editors told me I could write fiction if I wanted to; so often trans and gender-variant people are expected to write exclusively about their own experiences, so often we’re relegated to misery memoir or textbooks that play up the exoticism of our genders.
As I said above, the book is currently being crowdfunded, which means that we need YOUR HELP to make sure the book gets published. Our funding goal is a fairly modest £6,800, which will go to printing costs, isbn fees, author and designer payments and a number of other publishing-related expenses – you can view a breakdown of costs on the kickstarter page. There’s a very reasonable £5 e-book pledge level, and some of the authors (myself included) have decided to offer editorial feedback and manuscript evaluation for pledges of £100 or more (the “Extra Special Something” pledge level).
This is such a labour of love for all of us, and it really is the perfect book for crowdfunding. These are stories, from a whole range of authors who are cisgender, transgender, genderqueer and genderfluid. There are contributors from all over the globe as well, and some of the work has been translated into English from Russian or Italian. Knight Errant Press have made such an effort to include a diverse range of authors and perspectives. The strictures of binary gender are as restrictive to men and women as they are for the gender-queer, and all our voices deserve to be heard. There’s only twelve days to go before we need to be fully funded! So I encourage you to learn more about the project, and consider pledging to pre-order a copy of QUARRELS WITH THE GENDER BINARY.
a bold and vibrant print by Cinnamon Curtis, part of the UNICORN BUNDLE
What it feels like to find identity
I wrote this piece for a spoken word event hosted by Marbles Magazine in October. As it hasn’t been published anywhere I thought I’d toss it up here.
I grew up on the linguistically undifferentiated western coast of the United States, the only child of white, agnostic, middle-class anglophone parents. Mom and Dad are transplants: they in their turn grew up in Britain and the Midwest, respectively: the only cultural legacy they might conceivably have bestowed on me is a penchant for bland food, and even this legacy, thank god, I managed to avoid.
I grew up without learning Spanish in a mostly Spanish-speaking city–for some reason I decided to take Japanese in high school and my parents, ever-indulgent, let me. I had few white friends growing up, and my closest living relatives, apart from my parents, were in Chicago.
I’m not complaining about any of this, by any means (except perhaps not learning Spanish). Santa Ana is a wonderful place to live and grow up, and I was mostly happy as a child and mostly accepted by my little group of social outcasts. When I think about how–had my parents been able to afford it–I might have grown up twenty minutes to the south, in posh Newport Beach, or ten minutes west, in bland Tustin, I do shudder a little.
But what all this means is that I’m about as close to ‘identityless’ as you can get. I might as well have been grown in a lab, an attempt by an evil scientist to eliminate all possible differentiating variables.
But there was something the evil scientist failed to account for, and that is that I’m super, super queer. I’d known in one way or another that I was probably gay for some time, but where I grew up it was odd enough to win me entry to my high school’s resident ‘social misfit’ club, but not quite so aberrant as to get swirlied, pantsed or shut in a locker.
Almost by definition, gender and sexuality are things that are explored only after one’s childhood, as it were, is over. It shouldn’t be this way, but our society tends to frown upon exposing children to anything outside the heterosexual, cisgender norm, to anything that might give them a mirror, or make their own budding identity feel real, legitimate, or accepted.
So it wasn’t until university that I found out trans people were even a thing, that I didn’t need to identify as male or female, that I could like girls, or boys, or both, or neither. Of course I knew these facts intellectually, intuitively, but I’d never heard queer identities–my identities–discussed openly, called what they were.
When I got to university I was given a whole new vocabulary. All of a sudden, I was part of a Community. I was surrounded by people who were like me, with whom I could talk about things I’d never talked about with anyone before. We shared something more important than just geography or language or the colour of our skin.
It’s difficult to describe the release that those realisations represent. I willingly risk cliche to say that it was like coming home. When I think of how unanchored, how aimless I’d likely be without these identities I get uneasy. How would I know my place in the world, know myself, without ‘queer’, ‘nonbinary’, ‘asexual’?
It’s been no picnic, believe me: I’ve been mocked, alienated, depressed, anxious, chased out of dressing rooms and interrogated by public officials. But for all the heartache and confusion and existential terror, of being a thing your language has no language for, I wouldn’t give it up for the world.
Pride, Not Prejudice, Unbound and #AnthologyWeek
Friends! It’s a special occasion over at Unbound publishing. This week marks one year since the publication of their wildly successful book, The Good Immigrant! TGI is a pioneering book, and with it editor Nikesh Shukla opened the door for a whole host of anthologies, collections of work by authors from marginalised communities whose voices might not otherwise be heard. I wouldn’t be writing to you today if not for The Good Immigrant.
So why am I here writing to you today? I’m trans. You probably know that. And you can probably guess that I wasn’t always as open about it as I am now. I’ve felt for a really long time since coming out that I wasn’t giving enough back to my community. As writers I think we have a tendency to see ourselves as, at best, ‘armchair activists’: we put words on paper but what does that actually accomplish?
But books can and do make a difference. Growing up I had no literature to refer to about being trans, let alone about being nonbinary. If I’d been able to pick up a novel where the main character was trans, or see a mention of someone like Marsha P Johnson or Christine Jorgensen in a school history textbook, I would have been deeply affected. I would have known that I wasn’t weird or unnatural or alone, and that people like me have made, and are making, history.
That’s what this book is for. We’ve gathered a group of transgender and nonbinary writers and activists and bloggers and artists from a really diverse range of backgrounds, and with a wide range of different gender identities. Transness isn’t a monolith, nor is it the be all, end all of ourselves as people. What I want this book to do is to tell other trans people that there’s nothing wrong with being trans, that their stories are important, and that they’re not alone. It’s what I would have wanted when I was a kid.
If you want to help me and my fellow trans and genderqueer authors tell our stories, you can pre-order a copy of the book from our crowdfunding page. Please keep in mind that we can ONLY publish if we receive enough pre-orders to cover production costs, so I encourage you to pre-order.
What Ted Cruz’s Twitter Porn ‘Like’ Tells Us About His Generation
I woke up to a text containing the following image this morning, and all I could be was grateful to my friends for keeping me up to date. I wasn’t even surprised. We live in a time when the president of the United States can talk about assaulting women on tv and get less than a slap on the wrist for it. What we also live in is a time when social media has absolutely saturated our everyday lives, and porn can (though I’ve got no idea why you’d want to on such a public medium – exhibitionism?) be accessed through this media.
borrowed from this The Next Web article
The very basic rundown is that Cruz – though I’m sure we’ll see some hapless intern take the hit for this – seems to have ‘liked’ a video posted by porn twitter account ‘@SexuallPosts’. I haven’t scrolled on that account far enough to find it (please, don’t make me) but as far as I know the tweet is still up.
Far from being an isolated incident, this case is part of a raft of similar occurrences involving male public figures, the internet and social media, and porn. The one I’m most familiar with (give me a break, just googling ‘MP accidentally likes internet porn’ was enough to make me want to throw my laptop out the window) is the case of pastor William Henry Dewberry III, whose instagram account (and more) is pictured below:
screenshot borrowed from twitter user @therealIBK
Taken in August of this year, the screenshot says it all. (The aftermath: claims of being hacked, the account was later shut down and, potentially, resurrected under the same username by someone else with a sense of humor.)
So let’s break it down. What exactly is bad about what these men are doing? Surely there’s nothing inherently wrong with showing their appreciation for media they find sexually arousing*, is there?
But it is problematic. It’s upsetting because in all these cases, even setting aside the misogyny inherent in so much of the porn industry, it represents a fundamental dishonesty that says a lot about the people running this country.
The descriptors that immediately spring to mind for me are an odd mix of hypocrisy, naïveté and entitlement. Both men call themselves righteous, and use twitter – unlike how most of us use it – to present a ‘public facing’ veneer to the world. I can guarantee you that none of these dudes are tweeting about what they’re making for dinner or posting cat videos.
But, somehow, again and again, it becomes clear that these masks they wear for the public, be they of wholesomeness or professionalism, do not completely cover the yucky bits underneath.
It’s notable that in both these cases the men’s twitter accounts describe them as, in various ways, fighters for righteous causes. Dewberry’s IG account names him a pastor, and retired US soldier, both arguably admirable professions, though neither inherently morally righteous. Cruz’s profession is a mystery to no one, and he goes so far as to call himself, with nebulous accuracy, a ‘fighter for liberty’ (and choose a rather unfortunate cover image that centers on his groin area when minimized, nice going Ted).
You may want to cry foul at this point, at least for Dewberry, and that would be fair: a brief look at his instagram account suggests it may indeed have been hacked. But I posit that, as my links above suggest, these incidents are symptomatic of a larger problem. If someone wanted to frame him for some transgression, they had a very clear template to work off of. Powerful men using that most public of apps to give us a glimpse of their most private of tastes. It would be ironic if it wasn’t so nasty.
‘Naive’, too, because these men are very consistently members of a generation who grew up before the internet and social media was readily available. This is where the comedic value of their behavior comes from: most of the authors writing about these incidents are millenials or at least computer-conversant. To most of us, this stuff is so easy a child could do it. Many of us are children. It’s baffling, frustrating, and a little bit satisfying to see that the people who control the production of laws, the propagation of media, and the leading of our communities can be so demonstrably incompetent at something we’re all so familiar with.
And ‘entitled’, as most of these men undeniably are, because the consumption of pornography is not by any means new; it has been available to the general public far longer than the internet has. If you think about it, there’s never been any question that a lot of people, including politicians, consume pornography (though they seem to consume more than I do). But the fact that none of them seem to have been properly censured for it (though I note with satisfaction that Anthony Weiner does seem to have been charged) is galling.
Though they’ve all been lampooned, their behavior shows no signs of changing. At the very most I think the other men who would get themselves in these situations will take these news stories as an object lesson: don’t get caught. And I wouldn’t expect any different, but it’s still disappointing.
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*It’s necessary to point out that it’s been claimed the porn Cruz ‘liked’ was in fact incest porn. Though I’ve been unable to verify this, if true, then it’s very much wrong.
CROATIA SKETCHES 6 // Polače
sept 6:
Today’s been a warm, calm, lonely day. I think I’m ready to go back home, back to work. I hiked for a couple hours earlier today and found that an experience I’d wanted to have – a period of time and a place to walk where I could discern no sign of human activity – had been achieved, and that it was extraordinarily lonely. I had anticipated this and still wanted it but it’s helped me decide I’m not ready to leave humanity behind just yet.
sept 7 11.20am,
On the ferry now, saying goodbye to Mljet. The taxi I’d ordered for 9.30 came at 10, the 10.45 ferry left at 11. After a week and a half in this country I haven’t managed to get used to how relaxed they are about time. That’s a bit of a cliche about the Mediterranean, isn’t it?
My host gave me a lovely cup of coffee and a bag of bread and cookies – which I’ve already devoured – before I left. I had mentioned at the beginning I wanted to do some drawing (not just prose sketches) when I was here and my host really ran with that, even though I’m a complete amateur. But I suppose it’s good because it’s meant I’ve felt obligated to do some sketching, and I think I’ve improved that little bit. I left a drawing for my host in the room I stayed in, but after all the coffee and food and snacks is that enough?
My host also said I should come back, and I’m thinking seriously about it. Is the purpose of travel purely to see new places? This trip wasn’t. I think the next time I need to wind down and get away from people, maybe I’ll come back to Polace. At the very least I’ll recommend Pave’s place to my friends who decide to visit.
CROATIA SKETCHES 5 // Polače
[i’m back to numbering these again. Sorry.]
Sunday 3 Sept, 6.38pm.
Today was a tiring day, full of muscles i’m not used to using. I’m better on a bike than I remember, and haven’t had a proper coughing fit all day, well, since 1 this morning. I’m sitting on the balcony watching the sun go down behind the ridge to the west of the town. The one I cycled up this morning. I think I’m done with convalescence, which is to say I’m not giving myself any more excuses to sit inside and do nothing. The same can’t be said for sitting on the beach and doing nothing.
Polače has this curious second sunset, something I imagine must be very common in hilly countries but which I’ve never experienced. I’ll watch the sun go down, around 6.40, but the sky will only change color, like a proper sunset, twenty minutes later when the sun goes below the horizon, which is behind the ridge.
As I was biking back to Polače this afternoon a guy coming towards me lost his hat in the road. I didn’t know what to do so I just said, enunciating very clearly, ‘HAT.’ and pointed. The same guy has just walked below my balcony. I wonder if he knows I speak English. If not, it’s a bit less weird than me just having not processed the situation in time when his hat landed in the road. Maybe I only know the word ‘hat’, and not how to tell someone they’ve lost one.
CROATIA SKETCHES // Polače
[I’m giving up on trying to number these entries, it doesn’t really add anything other than organisaton]
2 Sept, 11.32am.
Up early again this morning, had a good breakfast. I owe the bakery one kuna (approx. .12 GBP) because I didn’t have exact change.
I’m going to write until 1 and then go for a swim at the beach. It’s windy, clouds are scudding overhead, and there’s a restive quality to the town. It’s very quiet and most of the yachts have moved elsewhere. I look at the weather prediction and I think I can guess why. We’re supposed to have thunderstorms this afternoon and tomorrow. I’ve always loved thunderstorms, probably beause (like rain, which I also loved until I moved to Edinburgh) they don’t happen often in California. And really, anything outside the norm is exciting and romantic to an extent. I’m pleased because I’ve got a good view over the little inlet and further east, out to sea, which is where I hope the storm will come from. It’s still intermittently sunny, but I can see the water getting choppier.
CROATIA SKETCHES 3 // Polače
31 August, 9.50am.
In Polače now. A couple hours to kill before check-in so I’ve found a little pebble beach further along the inlet, at the end of the street that makes up the bulk of the town. Polače is slower and more peaceful than Dubrovnik, I can already tell I’m going to like it here. I’m lying on pebbles, trying to favor my pulled serratus muscles, my feet in the water. The tides in this spot are so invariable that, when I lie back and shut my eyes, it feels like nothing more than a playful nymph, a sprite, splashing me with seawater. First softly, now harder. Perhaps she is trying to wake me up.
I’ve just noticed the cicadas. They’re a constant low buzzing chirrup, coming from the pine trees all around us which run in places right down to the shore. It’s a sound that says ‘summer’ to me though I’ve never lived in a place with cicadas. It fades from my consciousness without concentration. It’s almost subliminal and I wonder if it’s putting me in a sunny frame of mind, because all I want right now is to immerse myself in the cool blue water lapping at my feet.
1 Sept, 5.31pm.
Today has been a lazy day. I went for a wander in the national park, got to see the lake. I spent about an hour sketching an abandoned boat sitting broken under a tree. There was no one waiting on me and no one to worry about entertaining, so I got to finish.
Mljet has this kind of haze, I don’t know if it’s dust in the air or a light mist or what, but it creates a very evocative kind of layering, you can look out at successions of islands or hills, each one a little less defined. I think this is called a landskein.
Don’t know what I want to do with myself this evening. Perhaps a walk. A man on a passing yacht walks from bow to stern, and appears to be walking in place.
Eris Young IS NOW AT ERISYOUNG.COM 