It’s summer reading season and Jefferson-Madison Regional Library coordinates a variety of book clubs for all ages. One of JMRL’s recurring offerings is the First Thursday Book Club, a hybrid (in-person/virtual) meetup for adults hosted by Greene County Library and Friends of the Greene County Library. Facilitated by Branch Manager EJ Dowling, each month’s featured title is selected by the club’s members. “It’s a really great group of people who love reading,” says Dowling. “The group picks really great and sometimes unknown or unexpected titles, which makes for a great discussion.”
On July 2, the First Thursday Book Club will discuss the science fiction novel The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. Originally self-published in 2014 following Chambers’ successful Kickstarter campaign, the book was nominated for the 2016 Arthur C. Clarke Award and longlisted for the 2016 Women’s Prize for Fiction. It is also the first of four in the Wayfarers series, which won the 2019 Hugo Award for Best Series.
Set in the distant future, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet follows the adventures of the Wayfarer, a long-haul spaceship whose crew members punch wormholes to facilitate interstellar travel and commerce. Humans have long ago fled a mostly dead Earth and are now spread across the galaxy. Though there are still differing worldviews in this diaspora, humans have almost entirely become a pacifist species, humbled by the experience of destroying their home planet and now working to support interstellar harmony through the Galactic Commons.
Many humans embrace a culture of remembrance and repair, honored in small ways as well as large celebrations. Chambers writes, “Remembrance Day was a human holiday commemorating the day that the last homesteader set off from Earth—the day the last Humans left their inhospitable homeworld … The festival was meant as a gesture of friendship and unity among a fractured species, an acknowledgment that despite their difficult pasts, they could work together toward a bright galactic future.”
Chambers excels at worldbuilding as well as character creation, and The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is a propulsive read largely due to the details she shares about the interplay between species and characters. Each member of the Wayfarer crew has a complex personality, full of quirks and history, as well as species-specific traits. At the outset of the book, readers get to know the crew through the arrival of Rosemary, the ship’s newest resident, a human clerk who grew up on Mars and is trained in navigating interspecies relations.
The ship’s crew includes four sapient species, including a Navigator, a species that pairs with a neurovirus to enhance their ability to see multidimensional space. There’s also Sissix, an Aandrisk pilot, whose species is cold-blooded and covered in scales and feathers, and Dr. Chef, whose dual roles are implied by his name and who looks like what you’d get “if you crossed an otter with a gecko, then made it walk like a six-legged caterpillar.”
The human crewmembers include Kizzy and Jenks, eccentric human ship technicians who are most certainly neurodivergent; Corbin, the Wayfarer’s algaeist, who grows the algae that the ship runs on; and Ashby, the spacer captain, a human who was born in space rather than on a planet. There’s also Lovelace, aka Lovey, the Wayfarer’s sentient AI (who puts Claude and Grok to shame).
The crew works together to maintain strong relationships and a good reputation for their work, along with hearty appetites. As readers of Chambers’ Monk and Robot books will recall, the author enjoys writing about tea and snacks in great detail. The Wayfarer series characters eat a lot of bugs—big bugs, small bugs, marinated bugs grilled to perfection. Food is an important aspect of ship life, often supplemented with hydroponic vegetables as well as a constant flow of both happy tea (caffeinated) and boring tea (herbal) as well as mek, a soothing drink with soporific effects. There are also snacks aplenty, including Kizzy’s go-to, “devastatingly hot” fire shrimp.
Friendship is a core theme of the book, and the Wayfarer’s multispecies crew, like the ship itself, is ragtag but resilient. Despite disagreements, they are each other’s chosen family. The crew’s bonds are tested when the Wayfarer is offered a high-profile job punching a new wormhole to connect Central space with the distant capital planet of a new member species of the Galactic Commons. It’s a long-term commitment that carries a non-negligible level of risk but also offers more than ample compensation—and sets the scene for the titular adventure.
Along the way, the crew encounters homesickness, fear, grief, love, and space pirates, among other challenges. Chambers invites readers to reflect on themes ranging from family and colonialism to medical ethics and discrimination. A recurring theme: “Do not judge other species by your own social norms.” After all, punching holes in the sublayer of space is tricky, but not as complicated as surviving interspecies conflict and showing up for your best friends even when things get complicated.
