The Long way to Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
A Long Journey to a Small Angry Planet is just fantastic. Intimate and character driven, it lives up to the hype and delivers the closest experience to Firefly I’ve had since watching the show.
I’d read about these characters watching paint dry.
Despite the title it feels like a quick journey. There are few events that threaten to completely destabilise the cosmos, with events more focused on their impact on the individual. An arrest for a crime committed at birth, a home coming for a species that has very different social interactions, a revelation about one members reason for joining the crew, all are examples of chapters that are devoted, not to how events shape the world, but how those events shape the crew and atmosphere on board the ship. If you are looking for a huge event that preposes and inspires huge action then maybe look elsewhere as this is more of a creeping smile book.
It is also a book that does not need a huge character description in it's review. The story is about discovering who these people are and how they came to be in the current situation and beautifully reveals layer upon layer of complexity as each page turns. I will mention a few things I loved though.
On gun control and why I loved the Captain, Ashby – “He recreated the incident, imagining a gun in his hand. Would he have fired? He couldn’t say. But imagining the addition of a weapon in that scenario made him feel safer. He no longer felt helplessness. He felt powerful. And that was what scared him. ‘I’m not compromising my principles over this. That’s that’”. This mirrors my own thoughts on handguns, that they are there to kill people, and that the temptation to give in to fear and have one will be a decision that will bleed into other parts of life.
On identity, concept of self and slavery and why I loved Jenks and Lovey - ”Living with an AI that was designed to be less intelligent than you, just smart enough to do hard work, but not allowed to grow into something more? I dunno, I’ve always been on the fence about that.” I loved that this discussion about fairness and equality actually takes places between a human and a computer and that the computer is the one being asked how it might feel. It likes bringing a meat puppet into your home to cook food, sleep with partner, collect mail, all the while knowing that it could be a fully functional human except that you turned it’s emotions and ability to relate off. It gives the AI a power that it has earned by developing a real working relationship with a human being as opposed to taking over the world.
There is so much to enjoy here. Give it a read and keep an eye out for the second book that tells a much different story.
9/10
