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She used some of this knowledge on a pre-professional level, writing small fictional stories, mostly fantasy, based on her favorite books and movies. Chambers’ mother introduced her to Tolkien; Star Wars and Star Trek were the backbone of the movie night; she was obsessed with Sailor Moon. When Chambers was 12, Contact came out. To explore the unknown, to meet aliens “through a female heroine,” Chambers says, “it grabbed me hard.” She then began reading Carl Sagan, the beginning of her passion for space.
But looking up and out distracted Chambers from having to look inward, into the “absolute absence” he felt at the center of his young life. “Who I was, where I fit in, what kind of life I can expect,” she says, “and there was simply nothing.” Then, at 13, Chambers met a girl in a science class whose older sister had a gay best friend. “I was like, oh, that’s an option?” Chambers remembers thinking. “Well, my whole life makes sense now.” It would be several years before she felt comfortable enough to go out with her parents. When she did, Mom was wonderful; Dad, not so much. “It was really bad in the beginning, you know,” she says, closing a little. Although he “walks often,” Chambers says, she still doesn’t like to talk about it.
In Chambers’ books, humans — the word she uses not only for humans but for all kinds of members of her so-called galactic communities — do not appear. They just don’t have to. “I don’t have terms for gay, straight, etc.,” she says. “People are what they are and they take home whoever they drive and who they love.” The long way, Rosemary, a human woman, develops feelings for a female alien reptile named Sisix. Rosemary “bent down,” Chambers wrote in a key scene, “running a smooth fingertip along one of Sisix’s feathers.” When I tell Chambers that a colleague of mine (straight, male) who has read the book doesn’t believe that people would actually want to have sex with giant lizards, she’s horrified. Has he been on the internet at all?
The Internet is where Chambers from college meets his future wife, Berglaug Asmundardottir. In the Star Trek role-playing forum, to be exact. As far as we know, Asmundardottir is not a lizard; it is just Icelandic. When Chambers talks about her, the lighting in the room seems to somehow brighten and soften at once. In the confession section of each of Wayfarers’ books, Chambers thanks his wife in a new way. Record of several space born: “Berglaug the Incredible.” Closed and common orbit: “The best part of every day.” The galaxy and the earth inside“If a piece of my writing outlives me, I want it to be what he says I loved, so I’ll write it where I can.”
Outside of college, Chambers moved with Asmundartotir to Edinburgh. The plan was to find a job on the stage there – that’s what Chambers studied at school – but nothing special happened. A few years later, they moved to Iceland, where Chambers was a freelancer for American publications, writing dialogue and scenes for an unformed story about strange losers in space. For a long time, Chambers didn’t think it was a real book, she said. “I was like, nobody wants to read that. This is not a real story. There are no exploding planets. “In other words, the tension was internal. It comes from the characters.
When I suggest to Chambers that the stories in her novels reflect the process of going out — a lot of tension, very little plot — she pauses. “I think … I think that’s fair,” she said. “It’s not one of those conscious things, but I definitely think it’s fair.” Whatever the case, the story resonated. With the help of a few freelancers she had gained, plus the interest of a handful of strangers, Chambers was able to self-finance himself in the Kickstarter novel, which became A long way to a small, angry planet. Among other positive remarks, io9 called it “the most delightful space opera of the year.”
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