Becky Chambers’s Angry Planet
Five years after everybody else, I finally read Becky Chamber's The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. It's fantastic (like you've probably heard), part space opera and part refreshingly low-stakes found family drama. The short version is that it follows a motley crew of humans and aliens tasked with traveling to the edge of known Galactic Commons space and creating new infrastructure to bring light-speed travel for the Commons' newest alien members. But the plot, such as it is, is secondary to the characters' interpersonal relationships and broader development. What the novel lacks in tension it makes up for in humane, warm-hearted character building.
In one memorable arc, the first POV character, Rosemary Harper, slowly develops a relationship with an alien crewmate, Sissix. Right when Rosemary is ready to reveal her feelings, the moment in which most stories would zoom in on her nerves about being rebuffed, the novel instead focuses on Sissix's point of view. She is fond of Rosemary, but is concerned about the cultural differences between her own species and humans. Sissix worries that Rosemary may not understand her views on sex and relationships, and—despite her excitement—takes several pages making sure that Rosemary knows what she's getting into.
It's both tender and humorous, and also the kind of scene that would likely get edited out or at least trimmed down in plenty of other space opera novels.
So why does it work so well?
It used to be when I described a book as "like a videogame," I meant it as a jab—and this despite loving a number of videogames. What I was usually referring to was when a story was plot-driven to a fault, and when that plot involved little more than sequences of increasing violence with little repercussion for the characters. (The success of videogame franchises based on Tom Clancy's novels makes perfect sense from this perspective. Much of his earlier work, such as Red Storm Rising, reads like this kind of videogame.)
But this wasn't fair to videogames, or even to myself. If I have a go-to game genre, it's probably big, open-world single-player RPGs. Morrowind was my favorite videogame for the better part of a decade. Then my best friend turned me onto Bioware a while back, and the much-celebrated Mass Effect and Dragon Age series. Such games have their fair share of combat and puzzles, but what makes the games unique is the stuff that falls between the bouts of violence. It's character building, world-building, exploration.
Ask a fan about their favorite level of combat in Dragon Age: Inquisition, and they'll likely shrug. Ask them about their favorite character, and watch as they debate with themselves for half an hour. (It's a three-way tie for me, between Blackwall, Cassandra, and Varric. Unless we're counting non-party characters too, in which case Josephine takes the cake...)
Part of what makes those games great is that you have room to breathe, to take in the environment and characters at your own pace. Somehow, I think that Chambers hits exactly that same pacing in Angry Planet. It's not that there aren't difficulties. The crew of her protagonists' ship, The Wayfarer, face space pirates, sundry technical problems, and finally have a dramatic confrontation with hostile aliens. But these they are spaced out (no pun intended) between the kind of dramas that most of us experience in our normal, terrestrial lives...with the added complication of these relationships being inter-species. And while a novel has a single pace and an open-world RPG lets you meander at will, Angry Planet made me feel like I was getting to know its characters, species, and environments organically, the same as if I was leisurely exploring this galaxy at my own pace.
So I think I'm going to retire that phrase—"like a videogame"—as a descriptor, or at least as a negative one. It presumes a hopelessly outdated view of what video games are capable of, one I never even subscribed to. And it makes the equally common mistake of under-estimating the work of speculative fiction authors, and the many ways they can show us a different universe, and the people who live there.
