Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is one of the biggest successes in self-publishing in the last decade or so, as she ran a successful Kickstarter to give her the time to finish the book, which sold well enough that Hachette’s Hodder & Stoughton picked it up and published their edition a year later. The book now has three sequels, winning the Hugo Award for Best Series in 2019, and all of the sequels earned nominations for the Hugo for Best Novel. This book, at least, has “first effort” all over it, though, and it’s kind of clunky and overdone in so many parts, especially the world-building, which detracted somewhat from a fun if very light story about a group of misfits becoming an ersatz family aboard a spaceship.
The Wayfarer is that ship, and as the series opens, Rosemary is heading for the Wayfarer to serve as its clerk, handling all of the paperwork the ship needs to move through space, across civilizations and, often, punching holes in the fabric of space to create shortcuts across great distances. These artificial wormholes are the Wayfarer’s main source of income, and they do it with a truly motley crew of specialists drawn from multiple species. Each crew member gets their own moment in the spotlight here, so rather than a single plot we get a series of episodes that allow the focus to move across everyone on the ship, from Corbin, the stubborn, meticulous biologist who grows the algae that helps power the ship; to Dr. Chef, the mechanic and, yes, chef, from a dying species who also serves as the ship’s counselor; to Jenks, the engineer who is – slight spoiler – in love with the ship’s AI. Really. (Needless to say I found that one a bit hard to take.)
I think the real problem I had with Long Way was the extensive exposition as Chambers builds out her universe, with giant civilizations of many species, endless rules, fictional technologies, and at least seven characters who need some sort of back stories. It’s a trap many first-time writers seem unable to avoid, and I at least attribute it to the benign desire to get all of these thoughts – the whole universe they’ve built up in their heads – out on to the page, as well as to prevent too much confusion on the part of readers. It also drives me up the wall, because 1) we can learn about this stuff as the story goes along and 2) if I really, really need to understand the technical details of how interstellar travel works in your books, or get a full description of every species’ cultural norms, that’s a bigger problem than just giving us a few pages of extrapolation can solve. Since Long Way visits a lot of planets and has such a diverse crew, we get a lot of that cultural stuff, and the book ends up spinning its wheels for pages and pages while Chambers describes trivial points about handshakes or mating customs.
The book does tackle some larger social themes, although it does so in a cursory way because there are so many smaller stories in the novel’s 438 pages. There’s a bit about cloning, a part about LGBT relationships, some stuff about war and the ethics of supplying one side (pretty timely right about now) when you’re not involved, and more, but none of tit gets more than superficial treatment.
The Long Way has to stand on the strength of its characters, since the plot is modest and the prose more akin to YA fiction, and there Chambers has some more success, although it’s a mixed bag. Rosemary is fine as the closest character we have to a protagonist, as her wide-eyed views and relative inexperience outside of her home planet make her a sensible lens for the reader to view most of the action. Some of the non-human characters are a little overdrawn, notably the navigator, Ohan, so again we get bogged down in details rather than seeing the characters develop. The more I write, the more I realize I just didn’t care for this book at all, other than that it was light and easy to read. It’s not The Calculating Stars bad, but I hope the remainder of the series spends more time developing the characters than explaining its fictional universe.
Next up: I’m about 2/3 done with Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go.