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juushikaTitle: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers Book 1)
Author: Becky Chambers
Published: New York: Harper Voyager, 2015 (2014)
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 410
Total Page Count: 187,610
Text Number: 551
Read Because: about a thousand BookTube recommendations, buddy read with Teja, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: The crew of a wormhole-tunneling ship makes a long haul to their next job, a planet occupied by a strange, violent race. So: what it says on the tin, but only nominally because plot is not the point; rather, the journey is a mere vehicle for interpersonal exploration. The crew and their interactions span a wide variety (which is almost satisfactorily alien), and the messages within are often hamfisted but as obviously well-intended. It's creative, snappy, sappy, heartfelt; rather like Mass Effect on a smaller scale. But all of this was ruined for me by one plotline: Ohan's, which is ultimately about violating the autonomy, express wishes, and body of a sick person in order to forcibly cure them, and which resolves when he forgives the violation and becomes more normative as result of it—a message that hits me close to home and which I find inexcusable. This perhaps shouldn't eclipse the rest of the book's more successful diversity, but, for me, it does. I can't recommend this, or forgive it.
Longer form, more anger, explicit spoilers, as posted to tumblr:
You know what it’s time for? It’s time to spoil the shit out of The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet!
Within this Mass Effect-esque many-aliens much-character interaction such-space opera feels train, there’s a symbiotic sapient entity/virus, where the virus allows the sapient to think multidimensionally/in subspace but also significantly decreases lifespan. The majority population view this pairing as sacred, and live socially isolated & ascetic lives; a minority population has discovered a cure that allows the sapient to live longer and maintain most of the changes to their brains, and live more communally/normally.
And when this pair is dying from the virus, a third party gives them the cure! against their explicit, express wishes! and everyone else in the cast is angry about it! but it’s all okay because the sapient recovers, entirely forgives and even befriends the person that cured him, and becomes a more normal member of the crew! and everyone-ish lived happily ever after-ish.
Most of my reaction to this book ranged from tolerant to enthusiastic, and in universe this particular arc is presented both with some subtlety and internal justification: it wasn’t acceptable to cure the virus, even if it turned out well; and the dominant society was problematic and needed to be questioned/changed. But this arc doesn’t occur in a vacuum and it isn’t real, and—
—do I even need to say that violating the will and bodily autonomy of a sick person is abhorrent, and implying that doing so is okay because the sick person will learn the error of their ways and become accepting and healthy and normative after an outsider has “““fixed”” them is absolutely disgusting.
Am I taking this too personally, yes; is it eclipsing a few other hamfisted but well-intended and accepting explorations of non-normativity, yes absolutely. But ask me if I care. I don’t care. I am angry beyond reason and this toxic metaphor for illness can go fuck itself.
Shorter form, more swearing, as sent to Teja:
violating the bodily autonomy of sick people or really anyone is, just, absolutely disgusting, and the "it's okay, he liked it1!!!" resolution is ABSOLUTELY DISGUSTING, and i am beyond personally invested in this particular instance but holy jesus on toast fuck this book so hard
Teja and I have remarkably similar responses to the novel, despite our different tastes (he has more tolerance for feelgood, I have more demands from narrative structure) and the fact that illness and autonomy isn't a hot button issue for him. We've had a lot of back and forth chatter about most character's arcs, which—while not always positive—certainly indicates that these arcs are engaging. We both were disappointed in the dearth of plot, and the fact that the mega-arc was the least developed and most redundant of the bunch. But the book is a promising combination of elements, and I can see why it's had such positive reception; to me it feels like Mass Effect, and he compared it to Firefly—speculative/found family opens the narrative to a lot of creativity and feels. If it hadn't been ruined for me by Ohan's storyline I still wouldn't've loved it, because the tone was too cheesy for me, and he didn't either. It's hard to call a book with such an obvious, weighty, and varied interpersonal focus "insubstantial," but it sort of is nonetheless.
Author: Becky Chambers
Published: New York: Harper Voyager, 2015 (2014)
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 410
Total Page Count: 187,610
Text Number: 551
Read Because: about a thousand BookTube recommendations, buddy read with Teja, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: The crew of a wormhole-tunneling ship makes a long haul to their next job, a planet occupied by a strange, violent race. So: what it says on the tin, but only nominally because plot is not the point; rather, the journey is a mere vehicle for interpersonal exploration. The crew and their interactions span a wide variety (which is almost satisfactorily alien), and the messages within are often hamfisted but as obviously well-intended. It's creative, snappy, sappy, heartfelt; rather like Mass Effect on a smaller scale. But all of this was ruined for me by one plotline: Ohan's, which is ultimately about violating the autonomy, express wishes, and body of a sick person in order to forcibly cure them, and which resolves when he forgives the violation and becomes more normative as result of it—a message that hits me close to home and which I find inexcusable. This perhaps shouldn't eclipse the rest of the book's more successful diversity, but, for me, it does. I can't recommend this, or forgive it.
Longer form, more anger, explicit spoilers, as posted to tumblr:
You know what it’s time for? It’s time to spoil the shit out of The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet!
Within this Mass Effect-esque many-aliens much-character interaction such-space opera feels train, there’s a symbiotic sapient entity/virus, where the virus allows the sapient to think multidimensionally/in subspace but also significantly decreases lifespan. The majority population view this pairing as sacred, and live socially isolated & ascetic lives; a minority population has discovered a cure that allows the sapient to live longer and maintain most of the changes to their brains, and live more communally/normally.
And when this pair is dying from the virus, a third party gives them the cure! against their explicit, express wishes! and everyone else in the cast is angry about it! but it’s all okay because the sapient recovers, entirely forgives and even befriends the person that cured him, and becomes a more normal member of the crew! and everyone-ish lived happily ever after-ish.
Most of my reaction to this book ranged from tolerant to enthusiastic, and in universe this particular arc is presented both with some subtlety and internal justification: it wasn’t acceptable to cure the virus, even if it turned out well; and the dominant society was problematic and needed to be questioned/changed. But this arc doesn’t occur in a vacuum and it isn’t real, and—
—do I even need to say that violating the will and bodily autonomy of a sick person is abhorrent, and implying that doing so is okay because the sick person will learn the error of their ways and become accepting and healthy and normative after an outsider has “““fixed”” them is absolutely disgusting.
Am I taking this too personally, yes; is it eclipsing a few other hamfisted but well-intended and accepting explorations of non-normativity, yes absolutely. But ask me if I care. I don’t care. I am angry beyond reason and this toxic metaphor for illness can go fuck itself.
Shorter form, more swearing, as sent to Teja:
violating the bodily autonomy of sick people or really anyone is, just, absolutely disgusting, and the "it's okay, he liked it1!!!" resolution is ABSOLUTELY DISGUSTING, and i am beyond personally invested in this particular instance but holy jesus on toast fuck this book so hard
Teja and I have remarkably similar responses to the novel, despite our different tastes (he has more tolerance for feelgood, I have more demands from narrative structure) and the fact that illness and autonomy isn't a hot button issue for him. We've had a lot of back and forth chatter about most character's arcs, which—while not always positive—certainly indicates that these arcs are engaging. We both were disappointed in the dearth of plot, and the fact that the mega-arc was the least developed and most redundant of the bunch. But the book is a promising combination of elements, and I can see why it's had such positive reception; to me it feels like Mass Effect, and he compared it to Firefly—speculative/found family opens the narrative to a lot of creativity and feels. If it hadn't been ruined for me by Ohan's storyline I still wouldn't've loved it, because the tone was too cheesy for me, and he didn't either. It's hard to call a book with such an obvious, weighty, and varied interpersonal focus "insubstantial," but it sort of is nonetheless.
