“Rosemary Harper doesn’t expect much when she joins the
crew of the aging Wayfarer. While the patched-up ship has seen better days, it
offers her a bed, a chance to explore the far-off corners of the galaxy, and
most importantly, some distance from her past. An introspective young woman who
learned early to keep to herself, she’s never met anyone remotely like the
ship’s diverse crew, including Sissix, the exotic reptilian pilot, chatty
engineers Kizzy and Jenks who keep the ship running, and Ashby, their noble
captain. Life aboard the Wayfarer is chaotic and crazy—exactly what Rosemary
wants. It’s also about to get extremely dangerous when the crew is offered the
job of a lifetime. Tunneling wormholes through space to a distant planet is
definitely lucrative and will keep them comfortable for years. But risking her
life wasn’t part of the plan. In the far reaches of deep space, the tiny
Wayfarer crew will confront a host of unexpected mishaps and thrilling
adventures that force them to depend on each other. To survive, Rosemary’s got
to learn how to rely on this assortment of oddballs—an experience that teaches
her about love and trust, and that having a family isn’t necessarily the worst
thing in the universe.”
It took me a while to get into this book, the debut novel
from Becky Chambers. The Long Way to a
Small, Angry Planet owes a lot to old school science fiction –the speculative work
of the masters like Asimov, Clarke, and many others. It also resembles some of
the more modern writers who’ve sort of taken bits of space opera and tried to
make it a bit more realistic –and added some more progressive ideals about relationships between human and aliens.
Part of my problem with the narrative is that the book is
really a bunch of episodic set pieces, with pages of tech and jargon that
really is interesting –if you like that stuff (and her parents are aerospace engineer
and Apollo-era scientist), followed by some brief action. Yes, there was some central themes through out the book, but there was no real point, no real thrust to the crews journey. Also, since I really
grew up on the space opera genre, I’ve always found hard sci-fi a bit dry and dusty, which is why I rarely read the genre (even though the postulate very interesting ideas, some space opera sort of ignores in favor of action).
It’s not that it’s not interesting; I just don’t find it engaging on an emotional level. And, I
guess, on an intellectual level, as well, these books make me feel sort of an idiot.
While the technology is a bit weird, Chambers does create
some wonderful and easily identifiable characters –this was something I latched
onto and kept me reading. I liked that the author did not drag out the mystery
of Rosemary’s past, but I also found her to be the most irritating of the lot.
I mean, when her past does resurface, it’s handled in an okay way, but I found
the crews forgiveness a bit…too much.
This is also a novel that would really not appeal to
old-school sci-fi readers, as the book can be a bit progressive in nature. The
idea is that everyone, including Lovely (AKA as Lovelace) the AI that runs
Wayfarer, has a right to exist (and the sub-plot of Jenks falling in love with
the AI and Lovely apparently falling in love with Jenks is interesting).
All in all not a bad book, but (like many others) could’ve
been trimmed by about 40 or 50 pages.
No comments:
Post a Comment