Episode 48: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Lise and Andi rave about (and discuss) the first book in the Wayfarer series by sci fi author Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (2015).

Human Rosemary is running from her past, and lands a job on the Wayfarer, a wormhole-punching ship whose crew is made up of a variety of sentient beings (some humanoid, some not), and the ship’s AI stitched together into a family of sorts and working toward common goals. The crew lands a major contract for a wormhole job, but the job comes with some risks. This is the crew’s journey to that job, told through 9 different POVs of the crew members.

It’s a fabulously-wrought road trip space opera with gorgeous world-building expressed through Chambers’ characters and their interpersonal relationships and cultural and historical backgrounds, which reveal themselves in layers. The characters that populate this beautifully written journey make this debut unforgettable and Andi and Lise are pretty sure that when you read it, you’ll immediately read the next two books in the series and then read the whole thing again.

Find Becky Chambers at her website. Read an interview with her at CulturedVultures. Find out more about The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet at io9 and the Tor.com blog.

Plus, Lise geeks out about the lesfic novel Ask Me Again, by E.J. Noyes, while Andi talks about the show that kept her going through her recent bout of illness: Legacies.