A fun sci-fi adventure starring a rag-tag team of contractors trying to make an honest living aboard a wormhole tunneling starship known as The Wayfarer. Some might call this a cozy novel, but that does not mean that it is without conflict. There’s adventure to be had and danger to avoid and one character in particular has a dark secret. Some things that I really appreciated about this book:

1. The description of The Wayfarer portrays a very logical schematic for a large spacecraft that needs to endure long term missions.

2. The various alien species aboard, just as well described as The Wayfarer, bring a unique environment to the story that many space operas avoid, save for Star Wars and Star Trek.

3. It’s funny! ( )

Boring and saccharine. There’s no drama/conflict. Everyone is super understanding and it grated on me. I didn’t hate it, but I definitely didn’t enjoy my time reading it. ( )

This week I’ve been reading for escapism more extensively than usual and am pleased with my book choices. This, the latest, is a rare and delightful piece of domestic hard sci-fi. Generally, I have found, novels set on spaceships become somewhat intoxicated with the scale of space and tend to forget the scale of their characters. Here, there is no epic plot of galactic scope. The fate of the universe is not in our heroes’ hands. While I’ve enjoyed many sci-fi novels centred on that trope, it was refreshing to find one that went about telling a spaceship story quite differently. The setting is the Wayfairer, crewed by independent contractors who dig wormholes for a living. (Navvies in space, I guess.) The reader gets to know the crew of the ship and their daily lives as they take on a big contract. Said crew includes an AI, three different types of alien, and four humans of varying provenance. All are gradually developed as interesting, convincing, and appealing characters, with complex relationships that slide along a spectrum between reluctant office colleagues and close family.

I liked the characterisation and relationships a lot, but I loved them in the context of the world-building. There was so much that was thoughtful, intelligent, and original about it, and moreover it was conveyed through conversations rather than info-dumps (also a notable virtue of Anne Leckie’s [b:Ancillary Justice|17333324|Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch, #1)|Ann Leckie|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1397215917s/17333324.jpg|24064628] series). For example:

"Do you ever get tired of humans?"
"On occasion. I think that’s normal for anyone living with people other than their own. I’m sure they get tired of us too."
"I’m definitely tired of them today,” Sissix said, laying her head back. "I’m tired of their fleshy faces. I’m tired of their smooth fingertips. I’m tired of how they pronounce their Rs. I’m tired of their inability to smell anything. I’m tired of how clingy they get around kids that don’t even belong to them. I’m tired of how neurotic they are about being naked..."

A particularly powerful element of ‘The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet’ is using the introduction and characterisation of alien races to say very interesting things about humanity. In this particular future, humans have only recently been accepted to the Galactic Commons with the help of alien tech. The fact that humans wrecked their home planet and continue to fight amongst themselves marks them as an immature species. The contrasts with alien cultures are very neatly drawn, yet the overwhelming message is of how happy co-existence can be. The differences in language pleased me in particular - one included hand gestures, another required multiple windpipes, still another consisted of changing skin colours. Eating habits also varied, something that is treated as an opportunity for humans to widen their culinary horizons. I appreciated the conceit of spacefaring humans eating a lot of insects; a much easier protein source than mammals or birds (although something that Western diets recoil from - cf [b:Snowpiercer: The Escape|18594683|Snowpiercer The Escape (Snowpiercer, #1)|Jacques Lob|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1401073125s/18594683.jpg|26341122]).

In summary, this novel is a charming domestic drama played out on a spaceship. Comparisons to Firefly (also Farscape) are inevitable, and indeed I couldn’t help thinking it would make a lovely TV show. It’s difficult to see how the subtle details, careful relationship-building, and gentle philosophising could be adequately translated onto a screen, though. More importantly, there is very little violence, which is completely unheard of in current sci-fi shows. In a quietly revolutionary choice, the ship’s captain is a pacifist who refuses to handle a weapon. None of the crew are hard-bitten warriors, in fact none have any fighting skills at all. After hesitating between four and five stars, I decided to go for five as it is so rare to find science fiction that does not rely on violence for interest. It is rare to find a novel that assumes humans would need to be less violent to co-exist with aliens. I am pretty tired of science fiction about mercenaries that consists of fight scenes strung together, as if the only useful skills in a spacefaring future were kung-fu and firing a gun. ‘The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet’ is about all those other people, whose skills include engine maintenance, cooking, cultivating algae, filing paperwork, translation, and navigation. Ordinary people, as it were, in a beautifully evoked future world, all characterised so well that emotional investment is inevitable. ( )

The Wayfarer is a tunneling ship, creating wormholes that interconnect solar systems so that faster than light travel exists in the Galactic Commons. The ship is patched together from salvaged components, and operates by contract. It mostly does small jobs, because it is captained by a human from the exodus fleet. Humans were only recently accepted into the commons, and are often belittled. The main attraction is the development of interesting human, non-human, and artificial intelligence characters. The diverse crew land a contract with the Galactic Common government to establish a worm hole in the space near the galactic core, allowing access to the an abundant supply of nuclear fuel. As they start the process, they are attacked by a renegade ship of the inner core, and barely make it back to normal space, losing the personality of the ship's AI.
I noticed that the Folio Society did a limited edition of this book, and wondered what motivated that star treatment, so I acquired a paperback. ( )

definitely not the most compelling or exciting book, i’ve read, but i enjoyed it more than i thought i would. i mostly just read it out of determination since i put it off for so long, but it wasn’t even a quarter bad haha. i think the story is pretty realistic and believable, within reason ofc cuz it’s sci-fi. what i mean is that it wasn’t fluffy and the characters weren’t magically able to do impossible things. bad things happened and people had understandable emotions and i like that. that being said, the characters damn well better be good since the plot is on the back burner and the main focus is the characters themselves.

idk where to even put this in the review so imma just suddenly say it bahahaha, but this book kinda reminded me of degrassi in a way. which sounds ridiculous, but like the book was the characters having to take on a multitude of issues that happen in life. the whole “degrassi. it goes there” kinda deal but with sci-fi hahaha. like discrimination but it’s speciesism and not racism.

the only thing that particularly bothered me (and this is more of a personal taste) is the use of neo-pronouns. like i get it but at the same time ehhhhhh this book is in english. that’s the only reason why that came up. ur telling me a galactic language, a literal universal language, a language made to be common across the universe has the same issue that is more or less unique to english??? a language that was created when humans didn’t even know about the life off of earth? hard to believe ( )