Hmph, it's been almost a year and I don't have much of an excuse. I've been pretty busy at work and also chasing small children, but it's more like I've just been grouchy in general about politics and assorted other items that aren't really within my control, and at least for me that makes it tough to do things that aren't immediately necessary. I have been doing a fair bit of reading, though. Between the libraries I'm qualified to borrow from and my overflow stack from Half Price, I've got enough for a couple of years even assuming that I continue to power through it. And here's one I enjoyed.
Other than seeing this series on some end-of-year award lists, I didn't actually know anything about The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet going in. It's a fun, very soft SF romp that has elements of a picaresque novel and no particular ambitions to rewrite genre conventions or anything like that. It primarily follows the crew of the working-class starship Wayfarer and its multispecies crew as they make their way across the galaxy. Wayfarer is a tunneling ship that can construct hyperspace conduits, and the captain made a bid for a lucrative contract to build a tunnel to connect the Galactic Commons to a new prospective member species in the galactic core. That overarching plot is basically an excuse for a series of vignettes involving various crew members as they hook up, go shopping, get arrested and occasionally boarded by space pirates.
Although they don't necessarily have that much in common, I was reminded of Ann Leckie's Ancillary novels and Goblin Emperor as well. These novels deal with various intrigues and science fiction elements, but at the same time really focus on the well being of their characters, make sure they're getting enough sleep and eating well. It's perhaps a little jarring that I'd use the word comforting to describe a novel that includes the Earth being rendered uninhabitable and a genocidal war being fought by another species that involves weapons called "organ cutters" which are as unpleasant as that sounds, but honestly this whole thing was like literary chicken soup.
If you're the sort to complain about realism in your SF then this is not for you. The idea of blue-collar space travel aside, the ship manages to run its batteries off of algae somehow, there's little outside of handwaving about biological intercompatibility of the various species, laws on cloning seem implausible, and I've got a bit of side eye as to the implementation of artificial intelligence here. But there's a gray centipede/gecko creature with six arms who is the ship's doctor and also the cook, and calls himself Dr. Chef because his real name takes three windpipes and one minute to say, and if you don't at least get a smile out of that then I don't know what to tell you.
Pretty much everyone gets their turn in the limelight, but the novel begins and ends with Rosemary Harper, which isn't her real name, and she's gotten the gig on the ship under her real resume as a bureaucrat and linguist. What she's fleeing from is pretty obvious if you pay much attention and to the extent that the book has flaws that's one of them. It's not really presented as that big of a deal and when she comes clean there aren't that many consequences for her. Also, it's not her fault. But I did really like the idea that she manages to save the day a few times with her knowledge of other species and her mastery of obscure regulations. The captain is a committed pacifist, after all.
You might assume that the Small Angry Planet in question is Earth, but in fact Earth is an uninhabitable backwater of very little account and while humans are members of the Galactic Commons they were let in more out of pity, and don't have that much power in the body. Everybody finds everybody exasperating, but at the end of the day they are at least trying to make sure everyone's dressed warmly and not freaking out too much. The aliens on the far side of the proposed wormhole don't necessarily feel the same way, and to the extent it's a pretty heavy handed message that's also a weakness here. But on the whole, I'd like to hang out with these people, and that's about as much motivation as I need to read something.
