Unter uns die Nacht

I feel like there's not a lot I can write about this one without dropping too many spoilers. What I can say for sure is that I thought the themes of #belonging and #impermanence were conveyed extremely well here. The writing was similarly strong to A Closed and Common Orbit, with a few more perspective characters.

#anicca #anitya #interdepencence #interbeing

I appreciated how much this book fills out the world and culture of its setting through individual characters' stories, without having to do a lot of Worldbuilding per se. I found each main character in some way relatable, and particularly enjoyed the way their initially disparate stories gradually get connected to each other. In the end I didn't find it quite as satisfying as the more tightly focussed stories of the first two books, but it's very nicely done and has a lot of very timely stuff to say about ways people care for each other or fail to, and about both emigration and immigration.

Chambers closes out her space opera trilogy by returning back home to the humans who, despite making contact, despite having arrived, despite having been (reluctantly) accepted into a multi-species society where they remain the poor country bumpkin refugees, still cling to their generation ships and old traditions. A paean to community, to identity, to long-term thinking and reinvention... yeah, it gets very idealistic, perhaps overly so, and uses a bare-bones plot and far too many narrators to get there. But somehow it feels right that a series as optimistic as Wayfarers ends with a book that's so far into optimism, as a dream of survival against impossible odds, that it feels like a hippy dream. Right now, that's not necessarily a bad thing.