Third book in the series started by the charming gang-of-misfits-in-a-small-spaceship novel The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. As was true of #2, this is not exactly a sequel but rather another story set in the same universe. In this case, it is mainly set among the fleet of massive ships that set out from Earth generations before, when the collapse of the biosphere became inevitable. It is very much a slice-of-life novel. Yes, there is a bigger picture in view, but it is mostly life-sized stories of people dealing with life-sized problems. There’s trauma and death and sex and big decisions and the inevitable march of time and change, but the world is not being saved and it’s about mostly-good people who are mostly muddling through. I could certainly see how some people might say it is too assertively mellow – on balance, I didn’t find myself minding, though in some ways it is kind of a peculiar book. And I do feel the skepticism I feel with any imagined universe in which relations of oppression and domination seem to have disappeared from humanity without a trace in the several hundred years between now and then, with no apparent need for explanation or story – even given the quite lovely, pragmatic, humble, and humane socialism that has (credibly) been instilled by harsh circumstance as the way of life in the Exodus Fleet, racism and sexism and so on would not just disappear and you need to explain their absence. But, still, I enjoy the stories that Chambers tells and I keenly await the next.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.