By Becky Chambers. New York: Harper Voyager, 2018. 400 pp. Paperback. $16.99. ISBN 978-0-06-269922-0.

Reviewed by Rebecca C. Thayer, Harvard Medical School [PDF Full Text]

Record of a Spaceborn Few is the third book in the Hugo Award–winning Wayfarers series written by Becky Chambers. The book is set in the Exodus Fleet, a group of thirty-two spaceships used by humans to flee Earth after climate collapse made the planet uninhabitable. Designed as temporary housing until humans found a new planet, generations later the Fleet has become a permanent home for these humans, known as Exodans. The book follows life aboard one of the Fleet ships, the Asteria, through the perspectives of five different narrators, including Isabel Ito, the head of the Asteria Archives.

Chambers is not an archivist, having worked in theater arts and management previously. Based on the acknowledgments, she does not seem to have consulted any archivists prior to writing. I point this out not to denigrate Chambers’s expertise but to establish the context of the book, since an imagined future is always the product of the author’s present. With that in mind, it was interesting to me to see how perfectly Chambers’s world depicts potential effects of continued vocational awe in archives. Fobazi Ettarh defines vocational awe as “the set of ideas, values, and assumptions librarians have about themselves and the profession that result in beliefs that libraries as institutions are inherently good and sacred.”[1] I find this also applicable to archives, especially since in Record of a Spaceborn Few, distinctions between libraries, archives, and museums are collapsed. This is made explicit in an exchange between an alien and narrator Kip Madaki, who was raised in the Exodus Fleet:

“Don’t you have museums in the Exodus Fleet?”

“No,” Kip said. “We have the Archives, I guess.”

“What’s that?”

“They’re like a library.” (p. 344)

Issues Ettarh names—including librarianship as vocation, the library as a sacred place, librarians as priests, job creep, and awe—are all present in the archives depicted in Record of a Spaceborn Few, and I will examine them in this review. I do not address Ettarh’s discussion of white supremacy and diversity in libraries since that would require an in-depth analysis of how race has seemingly disappeared as a human concept in the world of the book.

For context, I will begin with a description of archives and archivists in Record of a Spaceborn Few. The Asteria Archives are located in a central plaza on the ship, alongside resources like schools and medical facilities. The Archives contain a public assembly hall for ceremonies, offices for the archivists, and the collections storage data room. The collections are all digital; the Archives contain no paper or physical objects. Ito tells us that before leaving Earth, humans “had crammed old-timey server racks full to bursting with records of Earth and personal stories, and every generation since had added to their work” (p. 54).

As head archivist, Ito performs some functions I found familiar: conducting reference interviews, assisting students, and supervising the other Asteria archivists. Ito states that “there was nothing nearer and dearer to the average archivist’s heart than categorising” (p. 141). This sounded familiar enough until I realized that what she was referring to was a yearly breakdown of work due to arguments over item-level description! I was horrified at the amount of time Ito spends on re-delineating periods of Earth history (surely, a task for historians?) and retagging individual digital files accordingly.

Ito’s head archivist role encompasses all sorts of less-familiar responsibilities, demonstrating a potentially centuries-long archival job creep. Job creep is when roles expand to encompass previously voluntary work. This is related to vocational awe as these responsibilities become mandatory due to the perceived essential and sacred nature of the job. Ito acts as a videographer and journalist, rushing to video-record the accidental destruction of a fellow Fleet ship, the Oxomoco. She’s a sociologist, diplomat, and historian as she acts as tour guide and human history expert for a visiting alien scholar.

Archivists have taken on ceremonial responsibilities as well. Ettarh demonstrates how Western librarianship originated with Christian religious institutions, and here archivists are once again religious leaders. Archivists are recognizable to the public by their special robes. They are a necessary component of every funeral, recording the ceremony for permanent storage. This makes the Archives a kind of cemetery for people without permanent physical memorials. Archivists also lead the birth ritual, known as a Naming Day ceremony. Naming Day ceremonies take place at the Archives public assembly hall, fulfilling Ettarh’s connection of sacred architecture between libraries and cathedrals.

The sacred nature of the archival profession in the world of the book seems to lead to some of the same problems mentioned in Ettarh’s article. Ito is overworked. She regularly describes staying late in the office, forgetting to eat, and being overwhelmed at work. Her wife comes to work to get her, telling her that she’s missed at home. Ito isn’t the only one; at least one junior archivist works as late as she does.

Ito believes that she has a responsibility to view and record traumatic events such as the destruction of the Oxomoco, even though she knows it will have a severely negative impact on her mental health. She forces her colleague to view the catastrophe as well. She believes her trauma is necessary to serve a higher purpose: creating a record. When teenager Kip Madaki feels that life on the Asteria is purposeless, Ito tells him that a career in the Archives is a way to find meaning in life. She says that by reminding humans of their mistakes, the Archives can prevent another disaster like the one that humanity created on Earth.

Part of Ito’s belief in the sacred value of Archives is her faith in their neutrality. She informs us that “if humans deemed it worth remembering, the Archives kept it safe” (p. 55). Certainly, a human society able to live in space does not have the same issues with digital storage that we do today, but it is hard for me to believe that “everything” from Earth would have been kept. Even if the billions of sheets of paper at every one of our repositories were scanned and stored, they would not constitute an objective record of “Earthen history.” As we know, what “humans deemed . . . worth remembering” has long been the history of the privileged. But a critical perspective on archives in the Exodus Fleet would puncture its hallowed aura. As Ettarh says, sacred callings require obedience. The myth of archival neutrality is central to Ito’s sense of purpose in life and her status as a religious figure. If she understood the Archives as an incomplete and flawed record of humanity, would she be able to accept all the sacrifices she had made in their service?

The Archives are so sacred to Ito that she values them above human life. Explaining their importance to Kip Madaki, a skeptical teenager, Ito asks him what he thinks is the most important cargo aboard the ship. He offers food, water, and air as answers, which Ito says are all incorrect. The Archives are the most important cargo according to her. She says, “We die one way or another. That’s a given. What’s not is being remembered after the fact” (p. 315).

The idea that archives are more important than living people is honestly offensive to me. It is dangerous to devalue human life. It is dangerous to believe that we should be martyrs for “the Archives.” Yet, I saw people expressing this same belief in the rightness of martyring humans to preserve collections after a fake story about the fire suppression system at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library went viral. The story incorrectly claimed that Yale’s system sucks the air out of the library during a fire, saving the books at the cost of every life inside.[2] Chambers and the public have come to the opposite conclusion of the Society of American Archivists’ (SAA’s) core values statement on preservation.[3] SAA states that preservation of materials should be a means to ensure access, while Ito believes that materials’ preservation is the ultimate goal, regardless of whether anyone still exists to access them.

Record of a Spaceborn Few demonstrates how deeply ingrained the concept of vocational awe is in the mind of the public. Chambers portrays almost every idea in Ettarh’s article as an uncomplicated positive. Record of a Spaceborn Few is a warning of what might happen to humans if we don’t solve climate change. However, the overworked, uncritical priest-archivist willing to sacrifice life to the Archives is also a warning of what might happen to archival workers if we don’t address vocational awe.

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[1] Fobazi Ettarh, “Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves,” In The Library With The Lead Pipe (2018), https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe.

[2] Bayliss Wagner, “Fact Check: Yale Library’s Fire System Protects Rare Books Without Suffocating People,” USA Today, February 12, 2021, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/02/12/fact-check-yale-beinecke-library-fire-suppression/4461144001/.

[3] SAA Council, “SAA Core Values Statement and Code of Ethics,” last modified August 2020, https://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-ethics.