[book post] The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

The first half of this book was very delightful to me in a very specific way. It's Firefly, but with more varied & inventive worldbuilding, and with all that punchy, Whedonesque dialogue replaced with an overall warmer atmosphere. It's almost too warm, really, verging on twee—but it stayed just on the right side of the line for me to thoroughly enjoy puttering around space with this charmingly tropey lil' crew. Particularly this vision of space—Chambers's universe is populated with a huge variety of sentient spacefaring species, and there's very fun and thoughtful examinations of how each species' unique culture arises from various combinations of physiological/historical/environmental factors. (e.g., there's this one alien species whose whole culture revolves "the Whisper," which is a brain-virus they infect all their kids with around age 5 or so, which makes them super-intelligent in ways that are very useful for space navigation, but also drastically reduces their lifespan; it's very cool to hear from this species about their whole deal! Another example: Earth still exists, but is nowadays mostly populated by weirdo human cultists who think going to space was a mistake and that Hunter Gatherer Life Or Bust is the way to go—except, of course, for the obligatory cultist-humans who hang out at major spaceports to pass out little pamphlets advertising their faith, haha.)

But, around the halfway mark, the book's focus naturally shifts away from pure worldbuilding to more plot-y developments, and, uh... big oof.

The main hook, at the novel's start, is that we know Rosemary has joined the crew under an assumed name, and we know she's escaping something back on Mars, but we don't really know why or what.

So, when Rosemary hears a news broadcast that's very related to why she left Mars, and is overcome with emotion, I expected something interesting to come of that. Maybe a crewmate notices her tearing up, and decides to snoop around to find out more. Maybe the news broadcast is ominous foreshadowing and her past starts catching up to her a few days later. Maybe Rosemary uses the broadcast as a tentative opportunity to "test the waters," to try and gauge everyone's opinion on some "hypothetical" situation, and she pulls back when she realizes how badly the crew would handle the truth. Like, I'm not a great plotter or anything, but there's many perfectly fine directions you can go with this!

Instead, Rosemary... immediately confesses Her Entire Deal to one of her crewmates, and said crewmate is immediately and thoroughly Kind and Understanding, and he spends a long conversation convincing her that Hey You Didn't Do Anything Wrong, and extremely conveniently, yes, Rosemary is not in fact culpable for any of the bad stuff she was trying to escape on Mars, and the only sin she ever committed was forging a new identity, so there's not even anything for anyone to really forgive. This all happens in the course of a single chapter, and then the whole thing's neatly resolved forever.

What the shit?

I thought maybe this was a one-off, a weird plotting gaff in an otherwise competent book. But Chambers proceeds to do this exact "introduce conflict, immediately introduce resolution in the blandest way possible" thing repeatedly. The captain hints to Rosemary that the ship's doctor has some Relevant Backstory, and then the doctor just immediately drops his whole deal the very next chapter, no problem. Some bad stuff happens to the ship's fuel guy and it's also resolved very tidily eight seconds later.

I get episodic plot structure. I like episodic plot structure. But episodes that involve no real tensions, and nothing at stake, in which everything's always resolved by Some Long Syrupy Conversation Where Everyone Communicates Perfectly? Yeauch. I had to look away from the book a few times because I was cringing so hard.

And, actually, the story's handling of the (only!!!) Not Entirely Nice character really irked me—

( warning: extra saltiness )

It's a shame, because there really is lot that's really very good and fun here. Like, I was still turning pages until the end; there's something very popcorn-y fun about this book's writing style, and I continued to enjoy the worldbuilding-y aspects throughout. And yet. Alas.

I understand this was the author's debut, so maybe their later work is better? But my twee allergy is pretty sensitive, so uh, maybe it's best avoided. Plenty else to read in the meantime, while I waffle on that question :P