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The Journey, not the Destination
Jun 2016 / Aug 2017
A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet / A Closed and Common Orbit - Becky Chambers – Hodder and Stoughton, 2015 / 2016
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The very best SF novels are a perfect trifecta of interesting, nuanced characters, ideas and world-painting that make you go "wow", and an engaging plot (and if the style is original and interesting, so much the better). Getting all three of these to line up is perhaps one of the greatest challenges is writing, so it is no surprise that many writers dodge one or more parts of the trifecta while they hone their skills in other areas. Becky Chambers has adopted this approach, and it has paid off in two novels full of engaging characters and interesting settings. It's just a shame that neither of them has much in the way of a plot.
A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, which could reasonably be subtitled "I miss Firefly too", is set aboard a spaceship called the Wayfarer. It is an ugly patched-together jumble of mismatched parts that nonetheless just about works, and acts as a metaphor for its similarly diverse crew. Our viewpoint character is Rosemary Harris, a Martian accountant on the run from a dark secret who is taken on by suave Captain Ashby Santoso to sort out his paperwork, just in time for him to win a lucrative contract to lay a series of wormhole marker buoys to a distant planet called Hedra Ka. The job sounds too good to be true, but the real problems may lie in his quirky crew.
The influence of the previously-mentioned Firefly (and, I would guess, its literary equivalent, Chris Wooding's Ketty Jay series) is obvious, but there is also more than a hint of James White's wonderful Sector General novels in the interactions of the multi-species crew. The three non-human crew members - Sissix, the uninhibited reptilian pilot; Dr Chef, a six limbed sex-changing cross between an otter and a gecko; and Ohan, an ape-like alien in a symbiotic relationship with a neurovirus that gives them the ability to visualise spacetime - are all strange but friendly. The same is true of most of the humans, the obvious exception being the algaeist Corbin, who in his first scene is given a politically-correct rebuke by Ashby for using the term "lizard" for Sissix instead of "andrask", her species designation. Kizzy, one of the engineers, is a quirky bundle of fun who is rather too obviously modelled on Firefly's Kaylee, while Jenks, the other, is in love with Lovelace, the ship's AI.
There are a few small issues with the characters - Corbin, the most unpleasant, is described as "unusually pale" for a human, and Ashby is notably blander personality-wise than his contemporaries, suggesting that Chambers has a certain bias against the white and the male - but mostly they are a very engaging group of people to spend time with. This is just as well, because the overall plot is sketchy to say the least. What it reminded me of most is the typical sequence of events in a computer role-playing game, in which a group of characters go on a series of largely unrelated missions that explore their back-stories one by one until the final adventure which resolves the original situation. A novel needs a theme to be effective, and other than the importance of mutual tolerance in a diverse universe (important, obviously, but hardly original), this doesn't really have one. Which does not stop it from being extremely entertaining.
A similar criticism can be made of A Closed and Common Orbit, a loose sequel that follows some of the minor characters from A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. In some ways it is a simpler book, with only three main characters - Pepper and Blue, products of a eugenics-based fringe society (yet another take on Plato's Republic), and Sidra, an AI who has recently been housed in a humanoid body kit. The three return to Port Coriol, a relaxed anything-goes community of artists and engineers, where Sidra has to work out what her purpose in life is.
And, er, that's pretty much the whole plot. Port Coriol is a fine science-fictional San Francisco that, like Sector General, one would really, really like to exist, but the story as a whole felt too slight for a novel. It's padded out by an extensive flashback sequence explaining how Pepper and Blue escaped the world on which they grew up; there is a thematic connection in that they too had to look for a purpose when they didn't fit the ones that their society had intended for them, but in general the impression is of two interwoven novellas rather than a coherent whole. The constant switching of focus between past and present means that to be honest, I have forgotten how the three main characters ended up. But I do recall that I enjoyed the journey.
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