A closed and common orbit5/7/2023 ![]() I also want to play devil’s advocate.įirst, let’s imagine someone who never had access to a university education reading this book. I want the freedom for people to produce a child and know that a whole society exists to make sure it will get everything it needs to prosper. I personally love the idea of dedicated community services to support education and upbringing and strong encouragement to make sure every child has access to these services. It’s not radical to suggest that it takes a village to raise a child. Chambers gamely offers women the right to visit, but doesn’t mention any cases of a woman staying to maintain a constant presence in her child’s life. Whoever she chooses will pamper her for her two month gestation period (Chambers likes to write about species that have easy pregnancies compared to humans), but then, like in Aandrisk life, the woman drops off her child and heads out. When an Aeluon woman shimmers, the child she is capable of producing becomes a commodity for teams of highly educated professionals to fight over. University certification is required to raise children. Aandrisk families leave parenting to self-chosen families of wise elders, but Chambers’s kaleidoscope-cheeked Aeluon people take it a step further. Despite the comfortable wrapping, Chambers’s work may well suggest a political agenda: Communities should raise children, not individual couples. Just two books in, we already see a trend. What’s radical today may be commonly accepted in the future, and what is utopian science fiction for if not imagining a better universe to come? Engines on, fuel pumps go! It’s time to talk about alien childrearing. Two books in, there’s a clear theme that goes well beyond commonly accepted wisdom. ![]() Is it important to note that Chambers’ takes on the marginalization of vulnerable populations to create wealth for others or the right for transgender people to exist are not radical? Well, I wanted to set the playing field, because Chambers is radical. By 2016, Becky Chambers’ beautiful writing voice was just one in a choir. A future where ordinary people would choose their sex (and everything else about their body) through technology was radical in Michael Moorcock’s The Dancers at the End of Time 1981. Novel takes on crossing between genders were radical when Octavia Butler wrote Wild Seed in which god-like characters take on whatever sex they choose in 1977. As I mentioned in an earlier post on Star Trek, radicalness ( boldness as I call it there) depends on the setting. They’re never explained in detail, but later on it’s revealed that Aeluon shon don’t manifest right at birth, and when they do, Aeluon parents take them to get a medical device that supports the process.īy creating a relatable gender fluid character, Becky Chambers implicitly states that people like this have a right to exist. Repeatedly, we get vague references to “implants” that activate in Tak when Xe is ready to shift. But does Chambers stop there? No, she takes it a step further, and actually builds some suspense around it. Xe even does it a few times throughout the course of the novel. Xe shifts between genders on a regular basis. A Closed and Common Orbit introduces the Aeluon shon Tak to the Wayfarer series. The Aeluon shon is an interesting take on gender fluidity/transexuality, and I suspect a lot of thought went into it. The implications of that may merit their own blog post, but I’m going to move on for now to a much more important subject: Sex.Ĭleverly, Chambers adds asexual and gender-fluid people as first-class gender citizens to the Aeluons, making them a four-gender species. Otherwise they would not be able to communicate with the other species in the galactic commons. In Chambers’s universe, the Aeluons, who never evolved a mechanism to hear on their own, have accepted species-wide surgical augmentation to enable them to speak and listen using sound. I always imagined the Aeluons looked like axolotls for some reason, but I think everyone else agrees they’re really just shiny humans with iridescent cheeks whose hue they manipulate in order to communicate. ![]() Now I want to move outward from Sidra herself to some of her more, let’s call them “colorful,” friends. In my previous posts I discussed Chambers’s statements on the ethics of marginalizing one population to enrich another, then I described Sidra the spaceship AI in a human body, and how Chambers herself wouldn’t mind being a robot.
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