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spacedout_reader 's review for:
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
by Becky Chambers
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
While I found the majority of reading (listening to) this book a little more enjoyable than the other book I've read by Chambers (A Psalm for the Wild Built), I'm deducting points for the narration. The narrator had strange pauses and emphases that were not constant, but frequent enough to be noticeable. The breaks between sections or perspective shifts were not noticeably longer than the breaks between sentences, which made things confusing at times. And the narrator mispronounced "heretic." I don't know if the book spelled it differently, but it seemed in context like it would be the usual word with the usual spelling.
Also, I think this book has a lot of missed potential. I like the cozy, atmospheric and episodic vibe it's going for, and I'd love to read more sci-fi in this style. However, the overarching story about the "small, angry planet" - inhabited by a species that cannot tolerate any disagreement - is the perfect opportunity to delve a little deeper into the theme of unity and cooperation without agreement using the interactions of different species and sub-groups within species in the GC. Instead, almost every difference of belief/practice between species or groups in this book is brushed off as "okay for them, but not okay for me because of a biological difference," flattening out the vast range of other possibly coexisting approaches to these differences, such as, but not limited to, "It's okay for everyone but I don't want to do that," "It's not okay for them or me but it's not something important enough to bring up, at least at the moment," "It's not okay for them or me and it IS important enough to try to convince them," "It's not okay and I have a moral imperative to try to stop them from continuing to do it," "I don't think this is okay but I'm not confident enough in my reasoning to do anything about it," etc. I think this would have been really interesting to explore as a thematic contrast to the "antagonist" species of the book, but it was barely approached in the case of Ohan's impending death due to religious obligations, and avoided entirely in the case of one species' belief that children aren't really people (which was a baffling avoidance by the author, in my opinion). These sorts of discussions could have given us a much deeper look into each individual character on the crew, and mediating such disputes and holding the crew together would have been a great chance for Ashby to really show what he's capable of as a captain. And especially given the degree to which this book... focuses on? enjoys? interspecies sex (and intra-species but public sex, in the case of one species), it would have been a great opportunity to explore those differences and disagreements more deeply than "everyone's basically chill with this, except those prudes over there."
While I do appreciate coziness, I probably won't be continuing this series.
Also, I think this book has a lot of missed potential. I like the cozy, atmospheric and episodic vibe it's going for, and I'd love to read more sci-fi in this style. However, the overarching story about the "small, angry planet" - inhabited by a species that cannot tolerate any disagreement - is the perfect opportunity to delve a little deeper into the theme of unity and cooperation without agreement using the interactions of different species and sub-groups within species in the GC. Instead, almost every difference of belief/practice between species or groups in this book is brushed off as "okay for them, but not okay for me because of a biological difference," flattening out the vast range of other possibly coexisting approaches to these differences, such as, but not limited to, "It's okay for everyone but I don't want to do that," "It's not okay for them or me but it's not something important enough to bring up, at least at the moment," "It's not okay for them or me and it IS important enough to try to convince them," "It's not okay and I have a moral imperative to try to stop them from continuing to do it," "I don't think this is okay but I'm not confident enough in my reasoning to do anything about it," etc. I think this would have been really interesting to explore as a thematic contrast to the "antagonist" species of the book, but it was barely approached in the case of Ohan's impending death due to religious obligations, and avoided entirely in the case of one species' belief that children aren't really people (which was a baffling avoidance by the author, in my opinion). These sorts of discussions could have given us a much deeper look into each individual character on the crew, and mediating such disputes and holding the crew together would have been a great chance for Ashby to really show what he's capable of as a captain. And especially given the degree to which this book... focuses on? enjoys? interspecies sex (and intra-species but public sex, in the case of one species), it would have been a great opportunity to explore those differences and disagreements more deeply than "everyone's basically chill with this, except those prudes over there."
While I do appreciate coziness, I probably won't be continuing this series.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Sexual content