Becky Chambers books are always a delight and this instalment did not disappoint. I was completely immersed in the life on the planet. All of the characters were vivid.

The final Wayfarers book – which seems a strange thing in itself, given this always felt much more a setting than a series, even if this volume does resolve one gently dangling plot thread from the first of them, The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet. And given the timing – it's set to come out 11 months after the Event – I'm inevitably curious about whether the ways in which it mirrors lockdown were a direct response, emphasised in late revisions, or sheer coincidence. The setting is a small facility at a wormhole transit hub, where three visitors of various species find themselves trapped with the two hosts after an unexpected catastrophe. The official communiques combine reassuring platitudes – "Thank you for your patience. We are all in this together." – with ever-stretching estimates of when matters will be resolved, in a manner which now feels all too familiar. Likewise the lives and plans put on hold, the people trapped away from family and friends, the sudden reversals of the emotional gradient in relationships, the anger bubbling closer to the surface, the difficulty sleeping as one's brain insists on repeatedly running through the problem despite one's knowledge that one can't do a damn thing to solve it. The poignancy of any reminder of what was: "It was an old memory, a nothing memory, but one made painful by the simple context of what life had once been." Even the guilt at the good moments: "It was odd to be enjoying such things while the sky was on fire." And of course there are good moments, far more than here, because while not without war, jeopardy and death, the world of Wayfarers is fundamentally so much nicer than our own.

An early scene which encapsulates that underlying gentleness is set thus: "The ocean beach was as beautiful as it was every time. The sky above was the pale amethyst of noon. The water below lapped at the shimmering black sand with a tender, rhythmic caress. People of all species milled about, some napping, some swimming, some collecting shells. The beach was lively, but not raucous; peaceful without being dull." True, it's a simulation, but even so, it's a simulation where the wish-fulfillment isn't sex, violence, greed – it's a really lovely beach that everyone can enjoy. Equally, out in the novel's real world, the setting has been very carefully calibrated by its keen owner-manager such that it's as amenable as possible to as many alien species as possible – and despite being essentially a motorway services in space, not once does any of the travellers stranded there have even the faintest grumble about the price of anything cross their mind, because it's being run as an act of cultural exchange as much as a business.

In a sense, Chambers already did something much closer to our current lockdown experience in her non-Wayfarers, far less sunny novel To Be Taught If Fortunate, where the protagonists spend several months trapped in their ship on a depressing planet of rain and slugs. Here, though...I think the moment I felt the gap most keenly was when two characters who've had quite a forceful argument over really quite foundational stuff know in an instant to put that aside when the crisis requires them to work together for the general good. You know, in exactly the way people so spectacularly haven't this year. This isn't a criticism as such – I'm a Wodehouse fan reading a novel about aliens using algae to travel faster than light, I'm not demanding scrupulous realism. But even more so than most reading in the 2020s, it did leave me deeply envious of a world that doesn't exist.

And that argument the characters had? It's over the injustices of the Galactic Commons, a situation whose analogies to injustices back here on Earth are pointed, but not always in ways which quite convinced me. One participant is Speaker, an Akarak – a race who were colonised and enslaved by the former galactic hegemons, the Harmagians. Left with no homeland, they're widely perceived as criminal by nature, and at this point you think, OK, bit on the nose, but let's see where this is going...and then Chambers keeps heaping the disadvantages on them, but most of these don't feel structural so much as just really bad evolutionary luck. So they're smaller than all the other sentient species, and shorter-lived, and the only ones who don't breathe oxygen, at which point the whole thing really falters as any kind of representation of terrestrial racism, where the tragedy is surely the divisions between people of equal potential based on the foregrounding of one tiny detail of genetic happenstance. And when Speaker gets into familiar arguments about how the new, supposedly fairer era of galactic civilisation is just "a less violent period of the exact same cycle", accusing another character's people of having "engaged in bloody theft and called it progress", the parallel doesn't really stand up given there's no direct argument with the Aeluon's rebuttal that her people have "never taken a world from someone, not once", only terraformed wholly uninhabited planets. It's an unfortunate bum note in what's otherwise a nuanced if very optimistic vision of the interactions between different peoples, where the dynamics can be imperfect in all sorts of ways (from well-meaning ignorance, through the embarrassing curiosity of the young, to genuine but not hardened prejudice) but ultimately soluble through curiosity and empathy. I particularly enjoyed the way that, for the first time in the series, none of the leads was human, and that accordingly our funny ways come in for plenty of puzzlement and mockery when we do crop up in conversation (cheese, in particular, is widely assumed to be a slanderous rumour, because how and why would any species even do that?). And not for the first time, Chambers is very good at using various alien sensoria as a brilliant way to talk about neurodiversity, and how exhausting it can be dealing with a world set up on assumptions about how minds work which don't apply to yours.

This also feeds into the work of Roveg, the character who made that simulation I mentioned earlier. Part of the skill of which is making it accessible to different species, so that each can feel their own body-type in there (that nobody has ever bothered to do this for the Akaraks before, and how that's resolved, is moving, and has clear and valid metaphorical intent, even while it sits somewhat oddly with the world we've seen in the previous books). He's an exile from his isolationist race, the Quelin, on account of his being "a known cultural deviant". Yet even here, one looks at the way the Quelin aren't dumb enough to muck with trade; respect common laws; object to inequality; and accept minimal fuss over gender transition – and wish that Trump's America or Brexit Britain could have been this polite and measured when they turned their backs on the world and the future. Still, while even the evil empires here are really quite civilised compared to our own, the character for whom I felt the most sympathy was undoubtedly fluffy, floppy Ouloo, host at the stopover, who knows there are problems in the world, and can't tell what solution is best, so in the meantime has come to a very practical manifesto for her own life: "I want everybody to get along, and I want to make them dessert."

(Netgalley ARC)

Thanks NetGalley and the publisher for the digital copy in exchange for an honest review.

This book is set on Gora, basically a planet which has the sole purpose of being a waiting place for those ships that will enter into the next wormhole and have to wait for authorization for such. We first meet Ouloo and Tupo, a Laru mother and her teenager son, who have an establishment there for those who are waiting. They will receive three guests on the same day: Speaker, an Akarak, Roveg, a Quelim and Captain Tem, aka Pei (also Ashby's love interest), an Aeluon. They were supposed to be there only for a short period of time and the whole satellite network stops working and they are stuck there until further notice.

Well, like in the previous books in the series, we have a plot-driven sci-fi story. We have 5 people from 4 different species trying to get along and get over the cultural barriers between them, so it's really interesting to see how they react and try to understand the culture and biology aspects from each other. Of course, those dialogues make us think a lot about ourselves and our society. I also really like how the author always debates war and explore the different perspectives of it.

The characters are flawlessly built as usual. They all have their quirks, their flaws and the things that make us love them. My personal favorite was Roveg. He's probably the easiest one to love, but I just couldn't help it. Speaker was for me the most complex character, which made me love her sometimes and also annoyed me a bit lol. It was also very good to see more of Pei and understand more of her species and her relationship with Ashby.

The only problem I had with it was that once again, I had a hard time getting into a book of the series. I don't know if the problem is me or the author or maybe both of us, but it always takes me a long time to get into those books, but once I do, it's awesome. Oh, and I also missed some humor in here. I felt like the other books had more funny lines, but it was still fun in some moments.

Overall, it was another great installment for the series.