The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
Hodderscape, 2015
E-book, 432 pages
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The words 'cosy' 'space opera' and 'epic' don't often sit together in the same sentence, but in this case...
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet is a cosy epic space opera, with baking and barbecues and herb-growing and body-scrub and the intergalactic equivalent of flaming hot Cheetos. It's like Firefly and The Archers (a rather gentle radio soap for those who don't know it) had a baby and sent it off on adventures. It also has bucket loads of friendship and hope and found families and even inter-species lesbian romance, while maintaining a mild peril rating throughout. In other words: the perfect holiday read (unlike The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber, about which more later). I thought it was fun, adventurous and sweet without being saccharine, with just the right amount of climax. I liked it a whole bunch.
The story of Becky Chambers' debut is a feelgood tale in itself. The book was originally self-published, with the writing funded via a phenomenally successful Kickstarter campaign. After being nominated for a Kitschie Award for best debut speculative fiction in early 2015 (up against some stiff competition) it was picked up by Hodder and reissued with a rather beautiful hardback cover in the UK. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't first attracted to it because it was so very, very pretty. And because of the aforementioned affinity with Firefly, a TV show that I still love with the fire of a thousand suns. The novel's set up will be familiar to any fan. The Wayfarer is a patchwork quilt of a space ship, a beauty in spite of herself, crewed by a ragtag band of multi-species sapient misfits. It's a tunneling vessel - the equivalent of a road-maintenance truck - making new pathways through space between locations in the Galactic Commons, a powerful association of governments. Captain Ashby is a Mal-a-like 'you're on my crew' figurehead, supported by his best friend Sissix (capable, Zoe-esque) and ships techs' Kizzy (read: Kaley) and Jenks (read: Wash). Anti-social fuel specialist Corbin, ship's cook and medic Dr Chef and the mysterious navigator Ohan make the rest of the cast, which is completed early on by the arrival of secretive Rosemary Harper, the new and inexperienced ship's administrator.
The story opens as the Wayfarer embarks on a year-long journey to Hedra-Ka, a 'small angry planet' which is home-world to a new sapient member of the Commons. Their job is to tunnel the first highway to this distant place, making themselves a huge lot of cash in the process. The conceit of the long journey acts as a convenient device to string together a series of episodic, self-contained chapters that detail the adventures and back stories of the Wayfarers' crew; in other worlds, it's 'how you get there that counts' writ large. Although the book has a clear beginning and an end, what happens in the satisfying middle section is basically a series of short stories that read like the fanfic of a previous novel. Chambers' writing is formed around a completely unabashed joy in her characters, who feel more like old friends than new acquaintances. The prose is breezy and familiar, the dialogue positively giddy and when the crew interact with one another the book comes alive. The deep affection for each and every one of them is what makes the book so readable, in spite of the bare-bones world-building and the frequent info-dumps.
World-building in The Long Way... is synonymous with back-story. Chambers seems interested in the origins and the politics of the Galactic Commons, in the governing principles of society, in home worlds and technologies only insofar they illuminate and explain her characters. Thus through the humans in the story - Ashby, Kizzy, Jenks, Rosemary, Corbin - we come to understand something of the exodus from Earth, of our species' low order position in the Galactic Commons and of our idiosyncratic reputation among sapients. Beyond that, nothing else. Similarly, what we know about the lizard-like Aandrisks we know because of how it explains Sissix in context; what we know about the Grum explains Dr Chef's perspective on life; and what we discover about Siniat pairs allows for Ohan's personal drama. Inevitably this limits our ability to understand the world beyond the Wayfarer; we only see the places and things it touches. This is very different from the experience of reading something like Ancillary Justice in which the characters are in the world; in The Long Way... the world is in the characters.
This means that the reading experience is pleasantly contained (even when the crew is off the ship) within the bounds of the Wayfarer, which acts as a sort of safe space to explore themes of class, race, gender, sexuality and disability. Tolerance is the status quo and the everyday challenges of co-existence - the problems of translations, cultural misunderstandings, physical taboos - can be intimately dramatised. For example, tensions of class privilege between humans from the rich Martian colonies (represented by Rosemary) and from the pacifist Exodan fleet (represented by Ashby and Kizzy) can be articulated and then overcome by the bonds of friendship. The sensitively written romance between Jenks, a human man with dwarfism, and Lovey, the ship's sentient AI allows characters to confront and adjust their prejudices. This is what makes the book such a joy to read: it dissipates familliar tension and difficulty without shying away from it.
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet falls into the same, increasingly popular category of really lovely sf books where most people are good people and life is fundamentally joyful as The Goblin Emperor and Ancillary Mercy; it's part of the antedotal wave against grimdark. I can't help but feel glowing affection for it, in the same way that I can't help but melt over tiny puppies. Even though incredulous cynic me thinks nobody is that tolerant/forgiving/understanding all the time, I can't but hope for a Wayfarer world in which things turn out ok, most of the time, and when they don't the people you love put their hearts around you and life goes on.
~~Victoria~~