The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

For the last few months I’ve been leaning heavily into “Firefly fiction” (I tried to come up with a better moniker, I swear, but how do you cram “tight-knit, motley crew of a class-B spaceship taking odd jobs just to keep the reactor running” into a catchy two- or three- word label!?) After Ocean’s Godori and Stars Uncharted, next up was Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. 

This book fits the Firefly formula to a T: The Wanderer is an old clunker of a ship, cobbled together from bits and pieces of other vessels and kept running through the blood, sweat, and prayers of its two overworked techs. (Speaking of techs, the engineer Kizzy is a dead ringer for Kaylee, no doubt about it!) The other seven crewmembers are conspicuously diverse in both species and personality, and everyone is pretty cheerful and friendly in their own way… except for the one grouchy guy, of course! (Gotta have a cantankerous foil for the other folks to play off, right?) 

When a new member species is admitted into the Galactic Council, the Wanderer gets the jump on the news cycle and lands a lucrative contract to bore a new wormhole from the inductee’s homeworld out to the main shipping lanes. But first they’ve got to get there, and without subspace hops, boy is it a slog: almost a year of plugging along through normal space.

That means there’s plenty of time for the crew to bond, argue, and reflect. They have healthy conversations that acknowledge the value of diversity, strident conversations that caution against imposing our cultural biases on others, and soul-searching conversations that reaffirm we’re all deserving of love, even the AI’s among us. There are a few bumps along the way, but every dangerous or threatening turn of events is wrapped up quickly without causing any lasting damage.

Here’s a perfect example: space pirates board the ship. They cold-cock the captain and train their guns on the crew, making demands… is someone gonna get shot!? No no no, not a bit of it! The clerk explains that they really need their fuel to get through space, OK? And sure, the pirates are out of food, but the crew needs to eat too! So OK, the pirates get it, they don’t want to be jerks after all. Everyone puts their heads together and they figure out a fair way to divvy things up so it’s still a nice, profitable robbery for the pirates without unduly jeopardizing the crew. And since the Wayfarer is on a job under contract, they’ll get to expense the bulk of their losses. Crisis averted! Next chapter, please.

These cozy guard rails aren’t necessarily a dealbreaker for me – it’s not my favorite style for this genre, but I can handle the change of pace if there are other good reasons to keep reading. I just had a really hard time getting invested in the Wayfarer’s mild ups and downs. Each new plot development felt less like an organic in-world event, and more like an opportunity to impart a not-so-thinly-veiled object lesson or bit of social commentary. 

That might sound like an odd criticism – after all, sci-fi has been a lens for social commentary and critique pretty much since day one. 1984, Fahrenheit 451, The Handmaid’s Tale – all of these clearly have something to say about what kind of world we want to make for ourselves. But they’re also rich, well-crafted stories that hook you with their plot or draw you in with their characters while making that point.

Chapters in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet feel more like parables. The message is the story, and everything else supplies just enough window dressing to make the point: it’s important for law enforcement to respect due process and human rights; we need to be accepting of sexual mores and preferences different from our own; patients have the right to refuse medical treatment that violates their personal beliefs, etc. More than the low-stakes coziness in general, that’s what really made it hard for me to get drawn into the Wayfarer’s trials and tribulations – the nagging feeling that the PSA’s were driving the story instead of the other way around. 

If you’re looking for a comfort read that feels familiar from the opening pages – a low-stakes, cozy ride through space with some kindhearted folks who always show up for each other – and you don’t mind a little bit of proselytizing here and there, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is a great fit. If you’re looking for something with more grit and tension, though, there are a lot of better choices out there (check out L.M. Sagas’ Cascade Failure, for one!)