The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Diversity, accessibility, inclusivity—giggity! I can't squee enough about this book. It's been a while since a story grabbed me like this, holding on and pulling my focus from other things; all I wanted to do was get back to it and keep reading. And this is the author's first novel? Wow.

The crew of the Wayfarer reminded me a bit of the crew in Farscape: kind of a ragtag bunch who end up as family; it's fun getting to know them individually and as a group. The storytelling is straightforward and compelling. The writing is descriptive enough that I felt like I was reading a film; in fact, I began early on casting actors in the various roles, which isn't something I often do. But I never got mired in the prose.

It was beautiful to read about different species of beings, different cultures, physical attributes, gender identities. I've never seen an author use “xe” and “xyr” before, so that was pretty great. The whole thing just oozes personality and charm and—most of all—love. I would love to see this world and especially these characters come to life on the big screen, and I can't wait to read the next book in the series.

I have seen this book accused of being a story in which nothing really happens, but that is decidedly missing the point on this book. This story is about the ensemble, the misfit crew and the journey rather than the destination. It explores some interesting ideas of prejudice and humans place in the universe. Most sci-fi starts with the assumption that humans would be the dominant species in the galaxy. Wayfarers takes an interesting view where humans have petitioned to join a pre-existing galactic council and are very much a minority interest. In this story we have caused environmental collapse on Earth and divided into a rich faction able to live on a terraformed mars and the rest who escaped in colony ships and fled into the galaxy before petitioning the galactic council for aid. Whilst our main protagonist is human, and the majority of the crew of the ship are human, the galaxy decidedly isn't. And whilst the majority of the crew is human, key members are not - namely the dr/chef, the pilot and the navigator. The relationship between the crew forms the beating heart of this book. There is some prejudice, some interesting questions on the morality of various potential scientific advances, interspecies love and a general exploration of different cultures. The world building that gives these distinct cultures is phenomenal - each species feels different, and feels non-human.

Superficially the plot is about the journey to the Galactic center to build a new wormhole for future travel with a new and very alien race. The actual plot of the book is more about the crew interactions and the people and place the crew meet on the way

I quit a third of the way in when they didn't even start their way to the small, angry planet. Yes. They are doing shopping at a market planet and a third of the book is already gone. If that tells you anything about the speed here then I'm happy I could help.

Here we have a space ship where a bunch of different creatures (though mostly humans) live together and do abso-fucking-lutely nothing interesting whatsoever. They get a new clerk and that's cool. I suppose?
So why did I hate this book so much?

This story is Tumblr and The Double Standards, The Novel. I doubt anyone has ever created something so kitchy and overly sweet while also being such a piece of shit deep down. This book manages to hit you in the head with the most forced positive sensitive snowflake shit while also being so incredibly two-faced it made me retch. I can explain it all through examples.

- This crew is a big family. They love everyone, they take in everyone, from feathered lizard creatures to humans with physical issues to one of the last members of a dying race that looks like (and I quote) ‘pudding with legs'. How quaint. They also have a single white man on the ship they hate and every single time he shows up everyone gets visibly disgusted by him. Is he nice? Nah. Would I be nice if my OWN CAPTAIN had self-professed issues with getting used to the sight of white people? Fuck no.
- Humans are constantly said to be the lowest of low idiotic pieces of inconsequential shit. Cool. They can do their shit in the galaxy but like... YUCK humans. At the same time Rosemary, the clerk has to think about her privilege because her family is rich. She literally thinks she is ashamed of having privileged ancestors because she had never eaten a certain type of “commoner” food.
- The feather-lizard types are constantly having orgies left and right while also don't give a shit about their offspring, which is considered to be a beautiful, colourful, diverse culture that everyone has to accept and love, Rosemary even repeatedly scolds HERSELF for not being automatically super into it, but humans are treated like total idiots for being monogamous or even just not wanting their long time sexual partners to die a violent death.
- It's horrible to call a space-feather-lizard a lizard even though it is a very mild insult, but repeatedly stealing others' personal hygiene tools they have paid for with their own money because they wanted to take care of their own specific needs is UWU cutesy quirky.
- Doing your job high out of your fucking mind while the life of people depends on you is cool, but not wanting to partake in said drug use makes you an asshole.

Honestly, I absolutely can't stand the fact that this book lacks any form of self-aware thinking when it comes to its own biases that are hiding behind this bullshit Care Bear glitter world. Anything human is automatically hated, anything alien, even when it's not at all nice or kind is magical and lovely. But hey, tolerance, UWU.
The issue of this is not helped by the god awful dialogue, absolutely brought to the highest level of the character Kizzy, who is this hyperactive, annoying ass mechanic. She sounds like a 12-year-old girl on Tumblr.

I have no idea where this book ends up, but if I have to suffer through one more page of Rosemary self-censoring her own thoughts that weren't even bad, just kind of surprised or confused because every fucking alien species of psychos is magically superior and wonderful just because Becky Chambers wanted us to feel like living a life that is considered normal by real world society is bad I am going to scream.
This thing is preachy, treats its reader like an idiot and does things just because being quirky without reasons is so in this season. Also, social constructs. I have heard that's a good buzzword, not like the stupid habits of aliens aren't as much of social constructs as actually not letting your fucking kids die is, but hey. Humanz R doodooheads, lulz.

I do not recommend this to anyone.

Originally posted on bluchickenninja.com.

You know how sometimes you read a book that gives you all the feels but then it takes those feels and jumps on them and mashes them into tiny pieces. That was The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet. To say I enjoyed this book is an understatement. Its a mash up of all the things I love about Star Trek, its about modern problems, race, class, gender, violence but told through a futuristic setting.

The story is told the eyes of a girl called Rosemary who has never been off Mars before and gets a job on a spacecraft with other alien species. Most of the story deals with Rosemary adjusting to living with these people and getting used to the fact that the human way of life and normal gender roles don't apply to aliens and even just assuming that they would apply can be seen as offensive. I suppose it's an idea that we should see more in science-fiction (it can't really apply to real life since as far as we know aliens don't exist). Just because we have male and female sexual organs doesn't mean that an alien species will have the same or even something that compares to it.

The characters are so fascinating, we have 4 humans, Rosemary is from what you would call the upperclass, these humans left Earth to start a new life on Mars but in doing so left the others behind to die. The other three are spacers which basically means they have lived in space all their life. But one of them also has dwarfism so you have this really interesting thing where they could be cured of their dwarfism – we even see how people having their genes changed is a normal thing – but they choose not to because even though they are small, they feel normal like that.

We have Sizzix, who is very similar to a lizard, though calling her, or any of her race a lizard is akin to speciesism. Just because the closest thing she can be compared to is a lizard doesn't mean it's okay to make that comparison. But we also get to see how the family dynamics in her species differs from humans (and that's really fascinating). We have the doctor/ chef who is also a member of an alien race, I don't want to say too much but he has a really fascinating back story.

And then we have Ohan who is the Navigator but also a navigator. The closest thing I can compare Ohan to is the Trill in Star Trek. Ohan is the member of a species called the Sianat, this race is infected with a virus while young, this virus gives them the ability to understand what is going on in the sublayer of space, an extremely important thing for a Navigator. However this virus makes them more than one person. Sort of like that episode of Voyager where a transporter accident turns Tuvok and Neelix into one person. But this virus ends up causing some interesting moral dilemmas.

I really loved this book. It feels like an episode of Star Trek. You have this organisation – very similar to the Federation – who have realised that they can do better than fight, so try to find a way to cooperate in peace. But it's really this little story about the people living together on a ship and the fascinating characters they meet. The only complaint I have about this book is that there is no sequel. Basically if you like Star Trek read this book. If you don't like Star Trek read it anyway.