The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
Becky Chambers
Harper Voyager, 2016. 443 pages. Science Fiction.

Desperate to leave Mars behind, Rosemary Harper takes a job on the aging ship, the Wayfarer. Rosemary signs on to be their clerk. And while her job is mundane, the crew is not. The crew of the Wayfarer, made up of four different species, four humans with backgrounds just as different as one species is from another, and an AI with a burgeoning sentience, punch holes in spacetime to make interplanetary and interstellar highways for small ships. When the captain takes on a job that will set up the future of his entire crew, what he doesn't know is that he is putting himself and his crew in between forces that have already drastically altered Rosemary's life as well as in the midst of a cultural war.

Offering a meditation on how families can be created through shared experiences and how different cultures can coexist despite their drastic differences, Chambers the space opera genre and gives it a core of family drama, filling a universe with characters that feel like real people. For people who want the action packed space operas like Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey, but want a down-to-earth component that provides a breath of fresh air in between tense sections of the book.

SMM