I think the Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers is my favourite science fiction of this past decade. So I’m a little sad that I’ve read them all now. But the fourth and final part, The Galaxy and the Ground Within, is pleasingly excellent.

In this novel, three strangers are passing through a small habitat dome on a planet called Gora while they await their turn entering a wormhole to continue their journeys. A disaster leaves them temporarily trapped with just each other, their host and her young child. The visitors are all different species, living very different lives. They have expectations and prejudices to deal with, as well as concerns about their delayed journeys.

Pei is captain of a cargo ship, an Aeluon who was introduced in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. Aeluons largely communicate by changing the colour and patterns of their fur. They don’t have vocal cords but most have an implant that enables them to approximate speech sounds.

Roveg is an artist, a Quelin exiled from his people. He’s a natural diplomat, multilingual and educated about many different cultures. He’s also very agitated about the delay to his journey, which risks making him late for an important appointment.

Speaker is a supply runner for her own people, the widely misunderstood Akarak. She has never been far from her twin but now their separation is enforced as only she came down to the planet’s surface to buy fuel while her sister remains unreachable on their ship in orbit. Akarak always wear biosuits outside their ships, which only adds to the ways in which they are misunderstood.

“Out the shuttle window, there was nothing but desert. Not the good kind of desert, like she’d seen on supply stops on Hashkath, full of wildflowers and the strange scurrying lives of animals in their natural niche. This was pure emptiness, a lifeless monument to all the different configurations rock could assume. The sheer amount of nothing frightened her. Gora was as undeveloped a place as she’d ever seen, and the bulkhead between her and the outdoors did less to reassure her than usual.”

Ouloo is their host, a single parent raising her child Tupo and running the Five Hop One Stop. Ouloo and Tupo are Laru, so there are four species sharing this small way station when disaster strikes and all ships are grounded indefinitely. They struggle at first to find common ground, and have very basic misunderstandings about one another. But they all mean well. There are no cartoon baddies here, only people trying their best to live their lives peaceably.

There are some lovely details. At one point the group bonds over the weirdness of humans, in particular the fact we consume the milk of other mammals. Chambers drops in the detail that Ouloo and Tupo speak a minority Laru language. Which I like as one of my pet peeves about sci-fi with multiple sentient species is that humans seem to be the only ones with a variety of languages and cultures.

This is a beautiful, humane, generous story. I loved it.

Published 2021 by Hodder & Stoughton.