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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.
Told in an alternating timeline of their initial connection and a not-so-distant future where they have found domestic bliss, As You Wake is a story of harrowing yet hopeful determination. Chambers offers readers a vivid glimpse into what it means to be human, and how we can foster meaningful connection in spite of our circumstances.
Come gather in the Forum at Town Hall Seattle to hear Chambers discuss her new work, and be amongst those who believe in the power of fiction to show us a way forward, even in the bleakest of times.
Becky Chambers is the bestselling author of the Wayfarers series, the Monk and Robot novellas, and other works of science fiction. She is a two-time Hugo Award winner, a Locus Award winner, and has been nominated for the Nebula Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, among others. Her latest work is the upcoming novel As You Wake, Break the Shell, the first in a new duology.
Becky has a background in performing arts, and grew up in a family heavily involved in space science. She spends her free time playing video games, hanging out in the woods, and learning about the universe. She still hopes to see Earth from orbit one day, though she’s gotten picky about who she’d take a ride from. Prone to hopping around, Becky can be found either in her home state of California or her wife’s home country of Iceland.
Caitlin Starling is the nationally bestselling author of The Starving Saints (2025), The Death of Jane Lawrence (2021), Last to Leave the Room (2023), and the Bram Stoker-nominated The Luminous Dead (2019), as well as the forthcoming The Graceview Patient (fall 2025). Her work showcases her love of genre-hopping horror; her bibliography spans besieged castles, alien caves, and haunted hospitals. Her short fiction has been published by GrimDark Magazine and Neon Hemlock, and her nonfiction has appeared in Nightmare, Uncanny, and Nightfire. Caitlin also works in narrative design and has been paid to invent body parts. She’s always on the lookout for new ways to inflict insomnia.
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1119 8th Ave, Seattle, WA, United States, Washington 98101
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