Looking Back Before Book Four
Before I step properly into the next stretch of stars, I wanted to pause and look back at Volume III.
This book surprised me.
I thought I knew what I was writing when I began it, but stories are awkward little creatures. They have a habit of turning round halfway through and telling you what they are really about. Volume III did that to me more than once.
It has a steadier pulse than I expected. It is tender, hopeful, sometimes funny, and more pointed than it first appears. It does not charge at the reader waving plot in the air like a warning flag. It sits down properly, puts the kettle on, and then asks uncomfortable questions with very calm eyes.
I rather love it for that.
This volume made me think a lot about accountability, consequence, community, memory, and the stubborn work of staying human. Not the grand, shiny, heroic version of being human either. The ordinary version. The difficult version. The one that has to choose kindness when tired, courage when frightened, and honesty when pretending would be easier.
As I wrote these stories, I kept finding myself pulled back to small things. A meal. A rumour. A child. A promise. A practical act of care. The sort of thing that does not always look dramatic from the outside, but can change everything when you are the person standing in the middle of it.
That is something I am learning more and more in my writing.
The big ideas matter, of course they do. It is science fiction. There are colonies, strange worlds, machines, markets, ruined landscapes, futures that have gone sideways, and humanity making its usual grand attempt to improve things while occasionally standing on the rake it left there itself.
But the small things are where the heart is.
What I love most about this volume is that the whakataukī are doing real work. They are not decoration. They are not there to make the stories look wise from a distance. They are the challenge inside the machinery. They kept asking me what sort of future I was building, what sort of people I was sending into it, and what old wisdom still had to say once the technology got shinier.
And honestly, old wisdom has quite a lot to say.
That has become one of the joys of writing this series. I start with a whakataukī, thinking I understand the shape of it, and then the story begins to argue back. It opens doors I was not expecting. It points to consequences I had not quite faced. It reminds me that wisdom is not soft. It can be tender, yes, but it can also be stern. It can look you straight in the eye and say, “Well? What are you going to do about it?”
Volume III feels like that to me.
If I were putting it plainly, I would call this one 3.5 out of 4 stars in my own heart. I am proud of its warmth. I am proud of its humour. I am proud that it lets emotional truth matter as much as speculative invention.
But I am also honest enough to know it will not suit every reader.
If you want your science fiction to be all speed, danger, explosions, and hard-edged momentum, this volume may feel too reflective. If you want cynicism, or stories where compassion is treated as a weakness to be cured, then this really is not your book.
But if you like science fiction with soul in it — stories with consequence, tenderness, wit, and a bit of moral weather rolling in over the hills — then I think Volume III may be exactly your sort of trouble.
Writing it reminded me why I keep coming back to this strange little corner of the universe I am building.
Science fiction is not only about what we might invent. It is about what we might become. Or fail to become. It is about the choices we carry with us. The damage we inherit. The kindness we manage anyway. The old lessons we ignore until they return wearing a space suit and a very disappointed expression.
And the older I get, the more I think those are the only questions worth chasing properly.
So, if you have read Whakataukī Among the Stars: Volume III, thank you. Truly. Thank you for taking the trip, for meeting these stories halfway, and for making room for this thoughtful, odd, stubborn series in your life.
It means more to me than I can neatly put into a paragraph, and as a writer, that is mildly inconvenient.
The good news is that the journey does not end here.
Volume IV is already waiting in the wings, with another sixteen stories, another set of whakataukī, and another stretch of future where humanity is still trying, failing, learning, repairing, and occasionally making a glorious mess of itself among the stars.
Which, frankly, sounds about right.
For now, I’m going forward with blogs about my writing process, because that feels like the right path under my feet at the moment. Book Four will be introduced shortly, and I am excited about that.
— Rebecca
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