Dennis Biba

This novel sets priorities! If there’s one thing that makes feminist science fiction more interesting than the male-dominated rest, it’s not female protagonists or the depiction of patriarchal violence – a deeper feminist critique starts with the basic structures of the narration, the narratives, and overrides them if necessary (see my review of Joanna Russ). Becky Chambers‘ novel The long way to a small angry planet, the first installment of the rather loosely connected Wayfarer series, begins with a typical hard science fiction setting: the crew of the spaceship Wayfarer is given the task of drilling a wormhole into a distant galaxy inhabited by a very warlike species of all things. Enough potential for a space adventure in the tried and tested form. However, the novel shows very little interest in its own story. And who made the rule that wormholes, astropolitical intrigues and space battles are even worth talking about? While conventional science fiction (starting with the early serialised pulp magazine novels) was often interested in life in space, Becky Chambers shifts the focus to life in space, or rather from hard to soft science fiction. What would life be like crammed into a spaceship, far away from your own home planet, in a confined space with a crew made up of four different humanoid species (and an AI)? How would everyday life be organised, how the relationships between the crew members look like?

Following the tradition of the Star Trek series, the Wayfarer is also a utopia in miniature, a narrowly defined place in the vastness of the cosmos, but not a perfect utopia, but an animated one with rough edges. Humanity has made an ethical leap forward. Sexism, racism and many other forms of discrimination have been overcome, and wars are hardly ever fought anymore. Under the rule of the Galactic Commons, various intelligent species have come to terms with each other. Nevertheless, life on a spaceship like the Wayfarer is no paradise, but is characterised by deprivation, life-threatening work and conflicts both inside and outside. Where different intelligent species have to cooperate with each other, friction and misunderstandings inevitably arise. The racism of the future is consequently called speciesism and is also officially outlawed in the Galactic Commons, but conflicts of various kinds constantly pose new challenges to these moral ambitions.

Dystopian literature often works with alienation effects to make once familiar things appear in a different light and thus become ‘uncanny’. In this novel, it is exactly the opposite: the completely alien, extraterrestrial, inhuman becomes familiar, which is also because of the very character-centered narrative style. Although the other intelligent species, the reptilian Aandrisk or the yeti-like Sianat, for example, are also humanoid in their basic features, they differ enormously from one another in social terms. The fact that cultural (and in this case even biological) differences do not necessarily make social relationships between the species impossible is illustrated in the novel in numerous, sometimes heart-rending episodes. Even an artificial intelligence, which, like all the others, can look back on years of socialisation and individuation, is granted a love affair that is described far less fatalistic and technophobic than in other sf stories.

However, neither the romantic relationships nor the personal friendships and enmities that develop in the course of the novel contradict the crew as a whole, which is both a working and living community. The crew of the Wayfarer is, there is no other way to put it, a family, albeit one that throws all traditional family concepts overboard and does not care about blood relations or romantic, hetero-normative ideals. Human concepts such as friendship, love and family merge here in a way that is on the one hand close to ecocritical approaches such as Donna Haraway’s winged concept of kin making and on the other to queerfeminist discourses. This fusion and deconstruction of various human relationship concepts is most clearly demonstrated in an episode on the home planet of the pilot Sissix, who introduces the other crew members to the (for them) complicated family structures of the Aandrisk species.

Marxist readings, only to be noted in passing, could discover a hierarchical wage labour relationship behind the elective affinity of the Wayfarer crew, which is far more functionalist than the text superficially suggests. If the workplace is also the home and colleagues are the family, then the utopia may ultimately be just a start-up company that is particularly sensitive to internal inequality. However there is not enough space here for a more in-depth analysis. But simply as a thought experiment that challenges our concepts of human coexistence, The long way to a small angry planet is truly enriching.

Becky Chambers (2014): The long way to a small angry planet [Novel]. USA.