Reading Update

[jaggedwolf]

Last one's a doozy.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

A fun enough book. January made a couple of truly dense decisions towards the end, and I found it difficult to care much about her feelings for Samuel or vice versa. On the flip side, I really liked Ade and Yule Ian and their story, and the world of the Written. I felt bad for Jane. Wish there was more of her and that January had kept her door more in mind.

The Fire Never Goes Out by Noelle Stevenson

Memoir in the form of short comics that sketch out Stevenson's life and feelings at the time. Super quick read, finished it < 30 min. Would recommend.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

Gah, I got so annoyed while reading this! It's like someone saw how bored I was of the tone and content of the tea plantation bits of Imperial Radch, and decided to replicate tiny versions of it to scatter throughout an entire book.

I've played all the Mass Effect games, I've listened to Starship Iris, I've read the Axiom series and I adore all three canons. A fun (not-completely-straight!) crew on a spaceship and alien world-building should be entirely up my alley. Instead I found the crew alternately cloying and incompetent, with the bonus of a super essentialist take on aliens and humans.

Things I liked
• The scene where Sissix and Rosemary decide to be FWB is genuinely endearing - it's charmingly written, their respective motivations make sense and for once, no one is being educated about something

...and yeah, that's pretty much it on stuff that worked for me.

The first 30-50% is more interested in shoving exposition in front of the reader than having anything actually happen. (Rosemary asks Dr Chef what species he is, and he answers with exposition on the Grum biological life cycle. At a different point, Kizzy tells Ashby that a thermal regulator regulates the temperature of something)

I think it's also trying to tell me how great the Wayfarer crew (other than Corbin) is, but it mostly made me think that Ashby is an incredibly incompetent captain. Have another list:

A list of things Ashby does:
• Ignores Corbin's complaints about his work getting pranked and his personal hygiene supplies getting taken by Sissix until said Corbin calls Sissix a lizard and Ashby can chide him for it. Was the book trying to get me on the speciest jerk's side here? Because that's what that bit accomplished
• Pointedly ignores any possibilities that flying into Toremi territory could pose danger to his crew
• Is super duper pacifistic, so his ship (that carries both valuable fuel cells and the ability to make wormholes) is completely unprepared for being boarded by pirates
• Has set no protocol for his crew about unexpected hails, such that even after the pirate incident Kizzy is totally chill with letting a random ship of aliens dock
• Doesn't lock down information about Ohan's cure, or the cure itself, so Corbin easily uses it

Honestly, how bad are other ships in this canon if the Wayfarer managed to win that contract?

That last bullet point could have been super interesting if this book was interested in exploring consequences, but it isn't. A terminal illness that makes you want to have it? Super dark, lots of questions on what counts as "you" and all that. But no, it's another "Ashby is incompetent" tick because in my opinion, if the sole person who can navigate you through wormholes is prone to seizures from their illness, you should be hiring a backup navigator. This is not a hard thing to predict.

Overall the book feels like it's trying to have it's cake and eat it by being a series of fun vignettes...that has Serious Events With Lasting consequences happen. Except any consequences are all off-screen. Rosemary's secret identity has nothing to do with her own actions. It makes sense for her to stress about it but nothing was gained from hiding it from the reader, because then we're more likely to roll our eyes than feel sorry when it's revealed. Ashby even finds out between chapters. Corbin is a clone! This is just to make him get beat up and be part of the cloying crew. Lovelace dies! She literally didn't have a character outside of being Jenks' love interest and again, Jenks' initial reaction is off-screen.

Other thing I rolled my eyes at: Kizzy's long speech on how Jenks isn't just her friend, he's her brother. It irritates me in fic too. Is this an only child thing? Because I have friends, and I have siblings. There's no promotional hierarchy of closeness here.

Okay, final complaint in my long rant: why are the aliens and humans so essentialist in nature? Humans and Grums just can't ~handle~ war the way rational Auleons can. No one understands how Aandrisks conceptualize children, the book even saying oh, all Humans would stop any adult conversation for curious kids. Nevermind that there are many human cultures today where kids are expected to quietly observe and not interfere, or that what the term "people" means in relation to kids also varies greatly.

Ohan's species are the closest we get to variations, and yet even that seems painfully limited. Where are the Aandrisks who never bother registering their feather families, or the Auleons who openly break the no-sleeping-with-other-species rule the way there have always been people who openly do such things? The non-Humans that repress a traumatic incident into their work?

In conclusion, I think I should go replay the Mass Effect trilogy.

(Okay, no, actual last thing: I was weirded out by the repeated mentions that oh of course anyone descended from the Exodan fleet is Ambiguously Brown because the fleet came from all parts of Earth and there was lots of intermingling. I know it's a common trope, but that's still not how genetics or human variation works AFAIK, unless the total human population is significantly smaller than I understood it to be. I am a very big fan of lots of characters being brown as is, you don't have to come up with reasons for it!)

Comments

[fiachairecht]

I only vaguely know you from my Network page but hi and also a billion plus-ones to everything you said about Small Angry Planet. I think "cloying" is exactly the word I've been trying and failing to find since I read it - I don't think I've ever come away from a piece of media feeling quite so scolded for wanting or expecting things to have consequences before.

[jaggedwolf]

Hi! And yeah, as someone who's definitely down for found-family crew shenanigans, I found it weirdly suffocating. I think I like my protagonist groups both more competent and with more reasonable conflicts (and not from a designated asshole guy...) that are actually explored, not fast-forwarded through.

[flowersforgraves]

I hated Small Angry Planet and it made me so, so angry. I'm sorry you also had a bad experience with it. (my rant about its treatment of Ohan, if you want)

[jaggedwolf]

Yeah, your reaction to the Ohan stuff is super fair - it was weird for the book to have an extended argument on why it would be bad to make Ohan take the cure, have Corbin force the cure on Ohan, and then have the resolution be from Ashby's perspective where he's angry about it but basically goes, welp, can't do shit now.

[smellslikefudge]

really looking forward to reading that angry planet book now :)

[jaggedwolf]

haha you know I'm looking forward to getting messages from you and seeing if you get as pettily irritated as I did (thank you for joining me on this adventure)

[alias_sqbr]

Yeah The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet really annoyed me too. I have been told the sequel is really up my alley and much better but haven't been able to bring myself to try it.

[jaggedwolf]

Yeah, I've heard the sequels are less twee and have a more focused plot, but characters and the alien world-building were off-putting enough that I'm not really interested in checking them out.

[fiachairecht]

I read book 2 first and thought it was good enough to try the others. It's the best by far - enough that, after I read Small Angry Planet and was like 'oh I hate this' followed up that thought with 'well maybe she's just getting better as a writer, I will try book 3!' And then I DNF'd book 3 for most of the same reasons I hated Small Angry Planet, so I'm just left staring at book 2 like '...but you could be not terrible if you tried?'