snippid

Last night I finished Becky Chambers' The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, a sci-fi book about a motley crew of spacefarers who "drill" wormholes to enable rapid travel across space for the diverse galactic alliance known as the GC. At the start of the book, they are offered a bid on a particularly difficult, lucrative job, and can't resist taking the bait.

This should be (another) lesson to me in not going all-in on a creator because I've enjoyed one of their works. I loved Chambers' To Be Taught, if Fortunate, and I've heard plenty of internet praise for The Long Way, so when I saw it at the bookstore recently, I dropped $20 on it readily. If I hadn't, I probably wouldn't have bothered finishing it.

First - if you picked up this book looking for the femslash, it's barely there, and it's a lot more friends-with-benefits than romance. The other two romances in the book get a lot more attention. This isn't a complaint from me, but if what you really want is F/F romance, it's not really here.

This is a character-driven book with barely a plot, which wouldn't be a problem if the characters were interesting. As it is, they are functionally interchangeable: a crew of people who are all optimistic, friendly, emotionally open, painstakingly polite, and obsessively well-intentioned (except for the one guy who's a Jerk, who exists to be a jerk whenever the scene calls for someone who needs to be less-than-fanatically-polite or there's a chance for Chambers to squeeze in another instance of his being a jerk, even when he's technically right). There is no character growth to speak of; none of these characters changes at all between the start of the book and the end. There's no complexity to anyone.

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We're back at the Earthsea Cycle with book 5: Tales of Earthsea. This book is a collection of short stories set in Earthsea, crafted as a kind of bridge between books 4 and 6.

Friends may recall that the last book, Tehanu, was not my favorite of the series, although I appreciate what Le Guin was doing. In Tales of Earthsea, we get the best of both worlds in a sense--a return to the fantasy adventure themes of the original trilogy combined with Le Guin's updated views on gender and roles. Like Tehanu, Tales of Earthsea is no longer really children's fiction. Sex, substance abuse, child abuse, and various other mature themes are much more present here than in the original trilogy. These later Earthsea books read like they were written for the then-adult fans of the original trilogy, and I think it works well.

In each of the five stories of Tales of Earthsea, Le Guin is introducing us to elements of Earthsea society not seen before in the series: How women ended up being excluded from wizardry, a young man with the ability to become a wizard (the magical aptitude) who decides he wants another sort of life for himself, a wizard of Roke who misuses his power and chooses not to return although he is invited to, a woman who wants to study at Roke but is refused. In this way, Le Guin gives much breadth to the world of Earthsea by introducing these stories outside the "mainstream" Earthsea narratives.

I respect that Le Guin doesn't just try to retcon the sexism written into the earlier Earthsea books--instead, she really tries here to reckon with how the women of Earthsea manage it, how they get around it, and how it hurts them. The resultant picture feels realistic, up to and including how frustrating it is to watch women be excluded from the school of Roke despite having helped found it. 

She continues with her theme of unexpected heroes--protagonists who are average people from little nothing towns on little nothing islands who despite expectations prove themselves capable of great things, which is always fun to watch. 

We get backstory on several things present in the original trilogy, like the founding of the school and some history of Ged's first teacher, Ogion, which was great fun (and once again I am screaming clapping cheering as the specialist boy in all of Earthsea Ged makes a cameo).

A very enjoyable read overall, and I feel properly enthused and excited for the next book.