Title: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Author: Becky Chambers

Completed: August 2025 (Full list of books)

Overview: A few years ago I came across A Psalm for the Wild Built. I don’t remember how I found it, but I loved Becky’s writing. The second book in that series came out a few months later and I tore through it. Just looking at the titles, her other writing never seemed to interest me. I finally got around to reading the first in her Wayfarers series and loved it.

The story explores aspects of living in a multi-species society without glossing over or minimizing the differences like many popular sci-fi books and movies (thinking specifically of Star Trek, but other also tend to be set in post-xenophobic periods). It feels relevant as we experience xenophobia limited single-species society currently.

Overall, there are fewer highlights from this than I thought as I was going through it. The one about “modders” stuck with me enough that I felt I should go back to find it again and highlight it. When I eventually found it again a few days later, I realized that I had highlighted it the first time.

Highlights:

• Feels good to be off that pod, doesn’t it?’
  ‘You have no idea.’
  ‘True. But then, you don’t know how good it feels to have your memory banks recalibrated.’
  Rosemary considered this. ‘You’re right, I don’t.’
• On some level, Ashby could understand how Port Coriol might be a little jarring to someone accustomed to the glossy prefab trade centres you could find throughout the GC, each as sterile and uniform as the other. The markets of the Port were anything but corporate, and the colony’s independent, anything-goes attitude was exactly what made it so beloved – or, to some, rather unsavoury. Ashby conceded that the Port was a little dirty, a little scuffed round the edges. But dangerous? Hardly
  • I feel this often comes up that people equate dirty with unsafe
• ‘I know, I know,’ Nib said with a shrug. ‘But we still have to go through the process of objectively disproving the claim. That’s our job.’
  ‘Why would people go to all the trouble of trying to prove something like that?’ Kizzy asked.
  ‘Because they’re idiots,’
• People would choose names for themselves that they only used within a network. Sometimes that name became so much a part of who they were that even their friends out in the real world started using it. For some folks, those names became their whole identity. Their true identity, even. Now, modders, modders don’t care about anything as much as individual freedom. They say that nobody can define you but you. So when Bear gave himself a new arm, he didn’t do it because he didn’t like the body he was born in, but because he felt that new arm fit him better. Tweaking your body, it’s all about trying to make your physical self fit with who you are inside. Not that you have to tweak to get that feeling. Like me, I like to decorate myself, but my body already fits with who I am. But some modders, they’ll keep changing themselves their entire lives. And it doesn’t always work out. Sometimes they seriously mess themselves up. But that’s the risk you take in trying to be more than the little box you’re born into. Change is always dangerous.’ He tapped her arm. ‘You’re Rosemary Harper. You chose that name because the old one didn’t fit any more. So you had to break a few laws to do it. Big fucking deal. Life isn’t fair, and laws usually aren’t, either. You did what you had to do. I get that
  • So many people modify their appearance to look more like how they see themselves even today without electronic modifications. This feels like a reasonable extension from where we are today
• She smirked. ‘I’ll never understand how the rest of you expect brand new adults to be able to teach kids how to be people.’
• Still, perhaps it was better that way. If she stopped caring about her hatch family, being away wouldn’t hurt, but cutting those ties was unimaginable. Besides, without leaving, she never would’ve met all the friends she’d made elsewhere. Perhaps the ache of homesickness was a fair price to pay for having so many good people in her life.
• The Quelin had huge caches of natural resources at their disposal, and had been originally brought into the GC by the Harmagians, who had plenty of money and fancy tech to offer in exchange. Not that the Quelin and the Harmagians actually liked each other. It was funny how the potential for profit always seemed to trump antipathy