The Long Read With Little in the Way of Results

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet - Becky Chambers

When I was just a teenaged science fiction fan, my parents gave me a short story collection titled Bullard of the Space Patrol -- yes, it’s still available, even though originally printed (posthumously) in 1951. The stories are pure space opera, all about life aboard a human-crewed spaceship called either the Castor or the Pollux, I forget which. Whatever the case, the stories follow the same set of characters on the same spaceship in more or less chronological order.

The point, I suppose, is that the book in question was sold to readers as a collection of short stories. That’s honest: what isn’t is anyone's pretending that The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is a novel, because it’s not – instead, it’s a collection of short space opera stories following the same characters on the same space ship in more or less chronological order. The debut effort of Becky Chambers, The Long Way… describes life on The Wayfarer, a “tunneling ship” in a distant future in which mankind has destroyed the Earth and is now a second-class member of a galactic confederation of sorts. The crew includes four humans, a reptile, a strange many-legged critter, a humanoid with a symbiont, and an AI.

In other words, Captain Picard, Mr. Spock, Seven of Nine, Jadzia Dax, Commander Data, Doctor Flox… and any of dozens of other characters in the Star Trek universe, Firefly, the Star Wars series, and all the other by-now hackneyed and semi-hackneyed science fiction tropes like space folds, galactic alliances, and the like. Each chapter (short story, actually) is self-contained except for the introduction of characters and scene setting, and most of them are standard set pieces: the bizarre market (think Mos Isley in “Star Wars IV”); the argument over the rights of an AI (think Isaac Asimov’s I Robot); the crew members with deep, dark secrets (about a million movies and novels). One of the only two things original, as far as I can tell, to Chambers’ version of the space opera is the idea that wormholes (“gates,” “trans-space tunnels” or whatever a scifi author calls them) are constructs instead of natural (c.f. Niven and Pournelle, The Mote in God’s Eye).

The other thing is that Chambers is apparently fixated on interspecies sex. Not only do we have two humanoids of different species coupling, we also have a lesbian relationship between a human and a reptile and the obvious desire of a human for the AI. Weird, if you ask me – perhaps she didn’t recognize it at the time.

When push comes to shove, however, I find that the greatest failing of The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is its lack of a real plot. There’s no buildup of tension and conflict, just one installment that’s more hectic than all the ones before it put together. The stories read like a series of episodes of a soap-operaish sitcom (on cable, perhaps, given the sex). Of course, if it had been sold as a collection of short stories, I might have been okay with it. To be sure, the characters are nicely drawn, if a bit on the derivative side – Kizzy, for instance, bears a striking resemblance to Abby Sciuto on “N.C.I.S.” When all is said and done, the lack of originality and the lack of an actual plot mean it just doesn’t measure up. Two and a half stars…

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