Review of "The Long way to a Small Angry Planet"

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (named “LWaSAP” afterward) came out about ten years ago. I read it under a Terence Eden recommendation. And I didn’t like it!

It’s filled with tropes. It’s as “Opera” as “Space Opera” can be. Filled with much more drama than the plot can handle, distracting completely from the main point.

By that I mean the narrative line is so sparse, with so many aparté that barely have any impact on the general plot line that it feels incoherent. This could have been fine! After all, that’s the narative archtecture of Don Quixot and The Idiot, which are monuments of literature. Yet LWaSAP doesn’t assume this, it tries to be a linear story despite not being linear.

LWaSAP is rife wtih deus ex machinas. Oh, it just so happen that the crew lands on a planet when this event that occurs every two to three years happen. It just so happen that the spaceship of the girlfriend is in distress right next to that of the main characters. How likely is this in a whole galaxy? Suddenly we discover that X is actually Y and is thrown to jail by Z which consider Y to be illegal. etc. etc.

Almost everything that occurs in the book is the result of a completely random occurence that comes out of the blue with no foreshadowing what-so-ever, and generally has very little impact on the rest of the narrative. Remember that forecefield that got bought in “desert planet nº2”? Well, it doesn’t ever get mentioned afterward.

The “aliens” are just humans with an outfit. People lode LWaSAP for the creativity of its creatures, yet it does feel very unimaginative.

The different races can learn and use the language of other species with a completely different physiology. I would imagine the difference between creatures that evolved on different planets would be such that it wouldn’t be as easy to learn an alien tongue as learning Italian, nonetheless being able to speak it.

All species smile when they are happy. It felt out of place to put smiles on alien creatures.

Maybe LWaSAP is victim of the Seinfeld effect. Current Hugo award finalist for the best science ficition series “The Final Architecture” by Adrian Tchaikovsky is eerily similar to LWaSAP. But outdoes it by all metrics.

The “science” (ie scientific mumbo jumbo/magic system) is much more credible; the story line is much more cohesive, going together toward the same direction; the alien spieces are much more interesting and alien, both in appearance and behavior (it falls close to the Lem line of nearly impossible to understand).

I suspect Tchaikovsky was inspired by LWaSAP (there is no way it isn’t, the main characters are so similar, and the concepts behind FTL navigation are so similar) But managed to make a true drama out of it.