The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Book 1 of the Wayfarers series

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This is a fantastic novel full of adventure and imagination. It follows the motley crew of the Wayfarer, a ship that bores wormholes in space to allow for super quick traveling between star systems, as they take on an especially challenging job.

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Time was a malleable thing, not the measured click that clocks would have you believe. Whenever the ship punched, Ohan had to be sure they came back out in the right time, as if it were all mapped out backwards and forwards and side-to-side, an infinite number of stories that had already been written. Time could crawl, it could fly, it could amble. Time was a slippery thing.

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The crew, who are an assortment of different sapient species, gets an exclusive opportunity to bore a hole from near the center of the galaxy, where a particularly vicious species lives, to Galactic Commons space.

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It takes a long time to get there and along the way they stop a few times. That allow us to get a crash course in an alien culture, we meet people who will be important later, and learn more about certain relationships.

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Kizzy grinned so hard she thought her face would break. This lady — this insanely beautiful badass who wore energy pistols and said things like disruptor mine without kidding around — was Pei. Ashby didn’t just know this Aeluon. Ashby was banging this Aeluon.

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When the story crescendos, near the end of the book, we feel it emotionally and intellectually. The author does an excellent job with both the science fiction parts of the story and the emotional bits. She weaves them together in such a way that we don’t notice how she’s done it, but by the end, we have feelings about things and the science-related calamity that happens gets the heart pumping.

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Becky Chambers also wrote The Monk and Robot duology.  Her writing is clever, irreverent yet sensitive, funny, and she does am exceptionally good job with character development. Each character, even ones that we meet briefly, are very well sketched.

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There were other Lovelaces out there, of course. Her core software platform could be purchased through any AI dealer. There were probably dozens of versions of her traveling through the galaxy — maybe hundreds, who knew. But they weren’t her.

The Lovey that Jenks knew was uniquely molded by the Wayfarer. Her personality had been shaped by every experience she and the crew had together, every place they’d been to, every conversation they’d shared.

And honestly, Jenks thought, couldn’t the same be said for organic people? Weren’t they all born running the Basic Human Starter Platform, which was shaped and changed as they went along?

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One thing that I found particularly amusing in the political reality of the world that Ms. Chambers created for this series is the fact that in the Galactic Commons (a federation of cultures), humans are the least powerful and influential. Other sapients actually feel sorry for us because we’re not as technologically advanced and we ruined our own homeworld.

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“I will now begin the scan.” She walked over to Jenks, at the far end of the line. She stared for a few seconds. “You are unusually small.”
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“And you have a shitload of legs,” Jenks said, holding out his hand.
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The Quelin said nothing. She pressed the scanner against Jenks’ palm.

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These novels won the Hugo Award for best series, and it’s easy to see why. I didn’t want to put this down.

Themes include friendship, home, and trust. Totally recommended.

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