Becky Chambers Books in Order

If you want to start with her space opera universe: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet → A Closed and Common Orbit → Record of a Spaceborn Few → The Galaxy, and the Ground Within.
If you prefer cozy, thoughtful novellas on a single world: A Psalm for the Wild-Built → A Prayer for the Crown-Shy.
If you want a one-off science mission story: To Be Taught, If Fortunate.

Becky Chambers is an American science fiction writer born in 1985, known for warm, character driven stories like the Wayfarers novels, the Monk & Robot duology, and the standalone space novella To Be Taught, If Fortunate.

She grew up in Southern California, in the city of Torrance, in a family where talk about rockets and planets was completely ordinary.

Her mother worked in astrobiology education, her father in aerospace engineering, and a grandfather had been part of the Apollo era, so curiosity about space soaked into daily life early on. She loved science and watched plenty of science fiction, but she was just as drawn to stories and performance.

At eighteen she moved to San Francisco to study theater arts at the University of San Francisco, focusing on backstage work and storytelling rather than lab work. After graduation she spent several years in theater management, learning how to juggle tight budgets, long nights, and the personalities that come with putting on a show.

Over time she shifted into freelance writing, reviewing games and culture and taking on whatever assignments would pay the bills. She and her wife spent stretches living abroad, first in Scotland and later in Iceland, where she continued freelancing for outlets back in the United States. In off hours she kept returning to a private project about a ragtag starship crew that felt less like a draft and more like time spent with friends.

When steady freelance work dried up, Chambers decided to give that project a real chance. She launched a small crowdfunding campaign so she could scale back other jobs and finish the novel, then self published it as The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet in 2014. The book gathered word of mouth support, picked up award nominations, and was eventually acquired by major publishers, opening the door for three more Wayfarers books set in the same Galactic Commons universe.

A Closed and Common Orbit, Record of a Spaceborn Few, and The Galaxy, and the Ground Within expanded that setting with new casts, from an AI learning to live in a human shaped body to the residents of an aging generation fleet and travelers stranded at a remote waystation. Together the Wayfarers novels earned the Hugo Award for Best Series and helped cement her reputation for patient, people first space opera.

Chambers has also written outside the main series. To Be Taught, If Fortunate follows four explorers who alter their own bodies to study distant planets, while her Monk & Robot novellas move to a solarpunk moon where a tea monk named Dex teams up with an inquisitive robot called Mosscap to ask what people really need from life.

Across all of these projects, Chambers has become known for hopeful, queer inclusive science fiction that treats kindness, community, and everyday work as worthy central stories.

She now lives in northern California, in Humboldt County, with her wife, literary agent Berglaug Asmundardottir, and continues to write about ordinary people finding meaning in a vast, complicated universe.