Play Book Tag discussion

This book is a pre-quel to the author's Wayfarers series. It takes place long before the first book in the series The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, and is a bit of an origin story.

Life has been discovered on far-flung planets and a space program has been created and funded by essentially crowd-sourcing private citizens across Earth. The result is a series of survey missions, and in this book we meet and follow the mission for one of these crews.

The crew is just 4 people. The distances are so vast they go into a type of hibernation for the journeys between planets, each stage in their journey taking many years. Each time they wake up, they get the "news", but again with the distance it takes 14 years for the news communications to reach them. Literally no real-time communication back to Earth.

They visit multiple planets over the course of 80 years, until one day (view spoiler)[news and communication from Earth just stop. They receive one last transmission from one of their sister crews, and then that's it. Radio silence. This book is the crew's last message to Earth. (hide spoiler)]

I really enjoyed the (fictional) hard science described in the book, but enjoyed even more the interaction between the crew members. At one point the narrator - ship's pilot Ariadne - describes them as a molecule. Interconnected and interdependent similar to the atoms in a molecule.

I do love Becky Chambers. Her stories are so humane