Space Station Mir

 I started reading The Galaxy, and the Ground Within  in September, but somewhere along the way, I started reading as slowly as I could. I even hid it and started a new book ( One Last Stop ) for over a week before reading the last little section, which made me cry with its tiny perfection. I've loved all of Becky Chambers' Wayfarers books, but this one might be my favorite. Five aliens thrust together at a waystation, due to a technical mishap. Chambers makes that premise live up to every bit of its anthropological, xenobiological, and quintessential promise every step (or paw, or mechanical claw) of the way.  p.s. I can't stop staring at that cover, and I love that one of the ships looks Federation Books Read This Month The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston On Division by Goldie Goldbloom (book club read) Eternal Life by Dara Horn (book club read for next month)

I would have no problem being a human father. Being a human mother, on the other hand, is much more complicated. Science fiction, however, offers some inspiration, and after I finished reading Becky Chambers' Galactic Commons books, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet and A Closed and Common Orbit, I   realized--I want to be an alien mother. I’ve long been impressed by the parenting solutions of science fiction. For example, the group marriage parenting in Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land , or the village parenting model in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time . However, Heinlein’s solution problematically had only women doing the parenting, which, although it freed up some of the women to pursue careers, is marginally superior to today’s model of childcare for those who can afford it. Piercy’s solution has long seemed the most elegant to me. Get rid of women’s unique biological ability to bear children, and--voila!--goodbye gendered inequality overall, and inequali...