Becky Chambers

The exponential advances in technology in the 21st Century are accompanied by increasingly prescient structural and social ills, losses of human connection, and a cripplingly bleak outlook on the future to come. How can we persist in a society which seeks to separate us from each other, forcing us to operate in an environment that is antithetical to empathy, togetherness, and true contentment? In her new book, As You Wake, Break the Shell , Hugo Award-winning author, Becky Chambers, grapples with these issues. Holding a mirror to our own society, Chambers depicts a universe of stubborn survival and found family, and of persistent danger and quiet wonder. As You Wake takes place on the resource-poor planet of Fortune, where life is challenging — but for its inhabitants, it’s home. Signy is a brilliant but reclusive botanist who bio-prints medicine from her small plant shop, often bending the rules to help those whom the system is designed to leave behind. Cora is a pilot, one of the few with the ability to navigate the massive, living ships that connect the scattered settlements of their solar system. Always looming is the threat of the “mindbleed,” a dangerous side effect of piloting that brings her to Signy’s shop. What ensues is a tale of humanity, romance, and situation-defying persistence.