⚠ CURRENT READ · SPOILER PROTOCOL ACTIVE
This is the book the congregation is reading RIGHT NOW. The plot sections below are sealed behind a blur. Tap them only if you have finished, or if you are the kind of person who reads the last page first, in which case Kel already knows and has logged it.
THE LONG WAY TO A SMALL, ANGRY PLANET
Becky Chambers, 2014
Case File · 823.92 CHA · Space, Cosy
Sian's pick · Book No. 8★ THE CURRENT DECREE
the_gist
The Wayfarer is a battered tunnelling ship. Its job is punching wormholes through space so that other, tidier people can travel through them, and its crew is a heap of different species who bicker, cook for each other, and quietly become a family. Rosemary Harper signs on as the new clerk with a slightly false name and a past she would rather not discuss. Then the ship lands the biggest contract of its life: a long, long job out to a small and extremely angry planet. Almost nothing explodes. Everybody has feelings about it anyway. After Mo's computer god abolished death and ruined several members' week, the congregation has voted, decisively, for a nice time.
Exhibit H: a knackered ship, a very long commute, and one planet having the worst day of its life. Not to scale. The planet insists it is fine.
the_crew
AshbyCaptain. Decent to a fault. The reason the ship works.
RosemaryNew clerk. New name. Filing as a form of witness protection.
SissixAandrisk pilot. Feathers, warmth, and a completely different idea of family.
Kizzy & JenksTechs. Chaos with a soldering iron. Beloved. Loud.
Dr. ChefCook and medic, same person, both jobs done with enormous care.
OhanSianat Pair navigator. Yes. Sianat. Sian picked this book. We have questions.
CorbinAlgaeist. Unpleasant. Every club has one, and it is never who you think.
LoveyThe ship's AI. Kind, curious, and notably not a god. Mo has been informed.
what_happens (SEALED)
The job. The Wayfarer takes a huge contract to punch a tunnel out at the edge of Toremi space, which means a year of travel and a great deal of sitting around being nice to each other. This is the plot. This is genuinely most of the plot. It works.
Rosemary's secret. The name on her papers is not hers. What she is running from is the sort of thing that would define a whole novel elsewhere, and here it is handled in one conversation, kindly, and then everyone has dinner.
Sissix and family. The Aandrisk chapters quietly detonate the reader's assumptions about parents, children and who you owe anything to. The club is expected to lose several hours to this.
Lovey and Jenks. A love story between a technician and a ship's AI, played entirely straight, and then the book asks what it would actually cost to give her a body.
The small angry planet. They arrive. The Toremi are not, it turns out, a species you can be nice at. The last stretch is where the cosy book presents its bill, and somebody pays it.
weird_things
Chambers crowdfunded it on Kickstarter in 2012 after publishers passed. It then got nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and launched an entire subgenre. Publishers, once again, correct about nothing.
It is widely credited as the book that made "cosy sci-fi" a real shelf in real shops. Every hopepunk paperback in the last decade owes it money.
There are four Wayfarers books and they barely share characters. You can read them in any order. The club will still argue about the order.
The book contains a species called the Sianat. Sian chose the book. The Librarian has opened a file and would prefer not to be asked about it again.
club_record
Sian's pick, ratified by Kel, who describes it as "a holiday, and I have earned one". Selected by acclaim after the congregation emerged from The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect loving it but visibly ajar. Content warnings this time: none, except a persistent risk of crying about a spaceship. Mo has requested that the record show he was right, and the record shows it, once, quietly, at the bottom of a page.
Tap anywhere in the void to punch a tunnel. Tunnels punched this visit: 0