Record of a Spaceborn Few

Record of a Spaceborn Few is a 2018 science fiction novel by the American writer Becky Chambers, published by Hodder & Stoughton in the United Kingdom and Harper Voyager in the United States. It is the third book of the Wayfarers series, after The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and A Closed and Common Orbit.

The novel is set aboard the Exodus Fleet, the community of generation ships that earlier books in the series mentioned only in passing. Chambers shows the fleet as a working society with its own customs: people share communal meals, families are organised differently from those of the planets, and the dead are processed back into the ships that carried them. The book follows several inhabitants at once, among them a young woman who leaves for a planet and finds the expectations there stranger than she expected, a visitor from outside who wants to understand how the fleet functions, and the officials responsible for keeping the ships running. Much of its subject matter is ordinary: work, mourning, hospitality, and what a community owes the people who will come after them.

Chambers writes science fiction about how people live together rather than about threats to them, and the fleet's question about whether to keep travelling or settle is answered slowly and by many voices.