Review: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This review is done in two sections, because I reviewed it as I read it for a book club.

At 1/3:

Overall, I'm enjoying it quite a bit. It has a tendency toward cheesiness in the style of Firefly, but it's a genre-aware cheesiness common to many space operas. It actually reminds me more of The Expanse series than anything else (which is a compliment, just to be clear, as I <3 The Expanse a whole frickin lot), though there was a dinner scene that felt like it was lifted part and parcel from Firefly. There are some aspects of the book that I feel would be problems for other people (and were slightly worrisome for me) - like the occasional infodumps, the sequential 'here are all the characters and we'll explain the role of each one in both the ship and in the book' setup, and (at first) Kizzy's personality in general - but like the cheesiness, I feel in those moments like the book is deliberately acknowledging its pulpy space-opera nature.

The crew is a solid set of characters, well-crafted to create tension but also move the plot along as the book proceeds. I'm looking forward to see how they react to being stuck together on the long way to this small angry planet. Jenks' desire to get the AI Lovey a body, Rosemary's secret identity, Ohan's deterioration, Ashby's scandalous love... can't wait to actually get on the road with these guys and watch it all fall apart (I assume). I was initially skeptical of Kizzy as she seemed like an over-the-top clone of Kaylee, but as she's developed, Chambers has done a remarkable job of making her strikingly similar to several actual people I've known and grounded in that particular kind of person, so she's grown on me. (And after participating in a Q&A with Chambers, I've learned that she apparently hadn't seen Firefly when writing the book, so at least Kizzy is her own kind of weird.)

So many aliens! And different kinds of aliens! And at least some kind of attempt to explain why most are bipedal and/or bilaterally symmetrical! When I'm bored, I often try to come up with the physical forms alien life might actually take, and it's a difficult and usually fruitless task both because I don't have a lot of the knowledge necessary and because there are just so many options. So I can respect when authors restrict themselves to recognizable body structures in their aliens as long as they are a) interesting and diverse and b) explained somehow in the course of the story, and Chambers has done both here. One of my favorite parts of space operas is exploring civilizations created by many different kinds of life-forms with different needs and beliefs, and showcasing the diversity not only of that life but also of humanity as it gets bigger and spread out. I love that Chambers doesn't make each species its own monolithic culture while still rooting the different subcultures within the physical and social tendencies of each species. A lot of fun to read, and again, it creates really fertile ground for both conflict and storytelling.

At the end:
We definitely got the character interactions and developments that I was hoping for, which was great. This novel was all about characters and feelings, for sure. My boyfriend was reading Hyperion while I read this and from what he’s said, in some ways it seems pretty similar – a bunch of people on a journey who each either share or go through an event, where the point is not necessarily the destination but the people you meet along the way. I loved each character’s story and I especially love that some of the stories are not quite what I was expecting. I was slightly disappointed that Rosemary’s secret background came out so quickly and with so little impact, given that the beginning kind of frames her as the main or viewpoint character (but the crew’s reaction – or lack thereof – makes a lot of sense for the characters, so that’s fine). Corbin’s arrest was shocking – but I always got a kind of Krieger (from Archer) vibe from him, so I guess I shouldn’t have been so shocked. ;)

That being said, there were some downsides, namely that we have all these lovely character stories but almost no unifying arc. I feel like it would’ve been a near-perfect read if the character stories were either more integrated into the Toremi story somehow or deliberately framed as separate short stories, because then I wouldn’t have this expectation of a larger story that is kind of let down. It felt a little like a series of side quests with its own mini-boss, or a strand of standalone episodes on a TV show where the finale was kind of an afterthought. Some of the interactions felt rather forced, like the incredibly arbitrary law that requires Sissix to be close to Corbin for a full year, or having Corbin inject Ohan; in both cases, we knew that something like that had to happen because of the tone of the book (Sissix and Corbin would have to grudgingly get over their hatred, someone would have to cure Ohan) but the actions themselves seemed unnatural given the characters and setting.

Overall, though, I would absolutely love to read more set in this world. I mentioned this in a comment in another thread, but this novel felt like a kind of introductory tour of a world, where we get to see brief glimpses of these wildly different societies and we get the main gist of them but never fully immerse. It would be super cool to read a whole book set on one planet, or following one character – something a little smaller in focus that allows for more depth and detail.

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