In addition to the main characters, there is also Tessa’s family and Isabel’s guest, a Harmagian researcher whose entries about her experience with the Fleet comprise a few charming interstitial chapters. There are a lot more characters here to keep up with than in A Closed and Common Orbit. We are also introduced to Isabel, an Archivist charged with recording and keeping Exodan history Eyas, a Caregiver charged with laying the dead to rest Kip, a teenager struggling to find his purpose in the Fleet or out of it and Sawyer, a young man with distant Exodan roots who decides to return to the Fleet in an attempt to try something different with his life. We find that lots of Exodans leave these days, as new opportunities and more interesting adventures present themselves, but many remain. This is the person Ashby occasionally sends messages and his spare creds to, as well as her young children. Our first introduction to this world is through Tessa, the sister of Ashby Santoso, the Wayfarer‘s captain.
These Humans remain in their ships, living as much of a self-sustained life as possible while still conducting business with the greater Galactic Commons. These are not the Humans who live on Mars or other outer planets, nor the Humans who created Pepper and Blue in fringe colonies. It takes place almost entirely within the confines of a few ships within the Exodus Fleet - the group of ships that departed Earth as everything finally fell completely apart and Human life could no longer be sustained. So, Record of a Spaceborn Few finally presents us with a picture of Exodan life. So this is a new and uncomfortable place and I don’t much care for it, I can tell you. I hear that a new book is possibly on the way in the next year or so, but I have never before found myself in a position of getting so into a series that is currently ongoing - my most-loved multi-volume works (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Lord of the Rings, the Aubrey-Maturin series) have always been finished well before I discovered them. I finished the series, despite really not wanting to.
While there’s nothing specifically barring you from starting with this book, you’ll get a much better idea of the larger world if you start at the beginning. I’m going to assume that the reader of this review has already read the first two books in Chambers’ Wayfarer series ( The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and A Closed and Common Orbit).
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