2022 read #32: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

443 pages

Published 2014

Read from September 9 to September 13

Rating: 4 out of 5

I've wanted to read this book for years, ever since I saw it on the library shelf not too long after it was first published. Over the years I probably checked it out from the library four or five times. As is so often the case with ADHD, the intent was there, but actually opening up the book and reading it was on the other side of an insurmountable hump.

After all those years loosely orbiting this book, it's funny that my introduction to queer space opera instead came from Joyce Chng's Water into Wine. The two aren't especially comparable, aside from the shared working-class, found-family, making-a-home-for-ourselves-where-we-can vibes. Where Wine takes place on the dirt, The Long Way is a tale of spacers, following our colorful hodgepodge tunneling crew as they hop from world to world and spend long stretches in space.

From the title, I had pictured something a bit grander, a long-form meditation on cramped quarters and the deep dark of space. Instead The Long Way is a series of vignettes: the new crew member comes aboard; the shopping trip at the interplanetary bazaar; the pit stop at the dusty outpost planet to pick up spare parts from cyberpunkish modders. It was a cozy, comfortable ramble rather than the epic journey I expected. And that was certainly okay by me. I think having a bit more of the deep dark vastness of space would have added something to the book, but in the end, it's the characters and their relationships that matter most here, and those were lovingly rendered and delightful.

Now, though, I'm jonesing to write my own queer working-class space opera.