Becky Chambers is an American science-fiction writer whose work combines imaginative worlds with an unusual warmth and generosity toward the people who inhabit them. Raised in California in a family heavily involved in space science, she initially trained in the performing arts before turning to writing, and eventually self-published her debut novel, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, following a successful crowdfunding campaign. It became the first book in her Wayfarers series and established her as one of contemporary science fiction’s most distinctive voices.
Her fiction has won Hugo and Locus awards, and been nominated for the Women’s Prize, the Nebula Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award.It is often described as “cosy sci-fi” or “hopepunk”, although she has characterised it more evocatively as holding up “both a mirror and a blanket to the world”. Her new novel, As You Wake, Break the Shell, which arrived this October, begins a new duology set on a hostile alien world but centred on a love story between a pilot and a reclusive botanist, and on questions of community and dependence.
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