The Long Way to a Small, Angry
Planet. By Becky Chambers. Harper Voyager. $15.99.
It’s all about the journey.
Becky Chambers has rung some changes on science-fiction standards, in which
“getting there” generally matters a lot less than where one gets to – which is where
the action is. There is precious little action in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, which is about – well, the
title really says it all. A young Mars-born woman named Rosemary boards a ship
called the Wayfarer, a good SF sort
of name, to get away from her own past and build herself a new life somewhere
“out there.” This is a basic trope of science fiction, one of many that
Chambers has absorbed – and one of many that she tweaks, sometimes decidedly
and sometimes subtly, in telling the story of Rosemary and her shipmates.
Those fellow travelers come
in all sorts – again, a trope of SF. Some are helpful, some less so, some
downright prickly, but, and this is something out of the ordinary, most are
basically nice. And even the less-than-nice
ones are invariably interesting: these characters have real character,
something that is not particularly unusual in this genre but that rarely
becomes as central to the plot as it is here.
In truth, there is not much
plot. The Wayfarer essentially builds
roads – star roads, ways that allow other ships to get from Point A to Point B
more quickly and more safely than Wayfarer
itself can. There is nothing really special about Wayfarer or, by implication, its crew or job – and that makes this
book all the more interesting. There is a fascinating mundanity to the
otherworldly exploits here; indeed, calling them “exploits” is stretching
things a bit, because for all the standard-for-SF vocabulary (bay doors,
navigation hub, ambi cells, the pronouns “xe” and “xyr,” a course called “Intro
to Harmagian Colonial History,” and so on), not very much happens in the course of the book. There is strangeness here, but
Chambers makes it a point to show that if aliens are strange, so are humans –
in this book, there is no unified human spacefaring culture but a series of
different, competing or complementary ones, plus some class-and-origin-based
prejudice.
Within 50 pages or so,
readers of The Long Way to a Small, Angry
Planet will understand exactly what they are getting: an exploration of the
interactions of a group of characters confined for a long time in a small space
and learning about each other and themselves as a result. That is exactly what
readers get for the remaining 400 or so pages. Chambers bends over backwards to
be inclusive, to the point that a certain level of PC-ness pervades the book
(and becomes somewhat off-putting after a while). There is a lot of love in
this novel, a lot of it, and that is
a wonderful thing, but Chambers’ determination to offer total inclusiveness
(all human gender relationships are just fine, all alien sexuality is taken at
face value, all everything is caught
up in a wave of sunny anti-prejudicial treatment) becomes, after a while, a
touch on the insistent side. Still, in contrast to the usual SF approach, in
which pretty much all the characters are white and straight, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
has much to recommend it.
The book, originally
published in England last year and now available in the U.S. as a paperback, is
not without conflict. There are bad people – bad beings, if you will – and some
bad things happen, including thievery and even tragic (or at least
pathos-laden) death. And the character variety can become a tad overwhelming:
Captain Ashby, an Exodan human (his forebears left earth to find a better home),
is in love with Pei, a fishlike Aeulon; the ship’s chef and doctor is a Grum
with six appendages ending in “handfeet” – his species is almost extinct; the
crew also includes an obnoxious algaeist (the ship is powered by algae), an
Aandrisk (a feathered, lizard-like being), and more. The book is about trust,
acceptance and the many forms that can be taken by caring, concern and
cooperation (and love); it is only incidentally about a ship hired to bore a
wormhole near the core of the galaxy and needing more than a year to travel
there. There is a fair amount of laughter in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, and it is a welcome antidote
to the extreme seriousness of so much SF. There is also an overall sense that
Chambers has created an extended group hug in which love, if it does not quite
conquer all, comes doggone close with a little redefinition and extension of
the term. Again, this is basically a nice
book about nice people – however
“people” may be defined. And if all the foundational pleasantness becomes a
trifle treacly and cloying from time to time, at least the repetitive material
here involves closeness and the gradual assembly of a strange, multifaceted
family, rather than lots of technologically driven destructiveness and grand
schemes of larger-than-life good and bad guys. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is, at its heart, not really
science fiction: it is fantasy, and just the sort of fantasy that many readers
will wish could become reality if and when humans do eventually travel toward
the galactic center.
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