First Impressions Friday: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Released: 2014
Publisher: Self-published via Kickstarter then picked up by Hodder and Stoughton
Pages: 404

The acclaimed first installment of the Hugo Award winning series Wayfarers. 

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From the publisher: 

The beloved debut novel that will restore your faith in humanity

When Rosemary Harper joins the crew of the Wayfarer, she isn’t expecting much. The ship, which has seen better days, offers her everything she could possibly want: a small, quiet spot to call home for a while, adventure in far-off corners of the galaxy, and distance from her troubled past.

But Rosemary gets more than she bargained for with the Wayfarer. The crew is a mishmash of species and personalities, from Sissix, the friendly reptillian pilot, to Kizzy and Jenks, the constantly sparring engineers who keep the ship running. Life on board is chaotic, but more or less peaceful – exactly what Rosemary wants.

Until the crew are offered the job of a lifetime: the chance to build a hyperspace tunnel to a distant planet. They’ll earn enough money to live comfortably for years… if they survive the long trip through war-torn interstellar space without endangering any of the fragile alliances that keep the galaxy peaceful.

But Rosemary isn’t the only person on board with secrets to hide, and the crew will soon discover that space may be vast, but spaceships are very small indeed.

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My First Impressions

This is a series I have been meaning to read for quite some time. I’m actually a little embarrassed to be getting to it later than other sci-fi nerds like myself. That’s why this book topped my wishlist for my book blogger Secret Santa and luckily my santa didn’t disappoint!

My edition boasts the newer, more awe-inspiring cover posted above. It’s pretty to look at, but for some reason I prefer the cheesy cover used on the self-published edition. Both are fantastic covers, they just have totally different feels to them.

So far the book is reminding me a bit of like one of the best tv shows ever, Firefly, except with several characters boasting more than four limbs. Even though I live and breathe Star Trek, when it comes to aliens in fiction I’m really hard to impress. It’s odd, but with sci-fi I prefer it to be futuristic and universe spanning yet in ways that are easy enough to imagine as being attainable in the near future. That all goes out the window with Trek, don’t ask me why!

I was a little thrown off by this book’s “Oh hey, here’s a bunch of reptiles, walrus-type aliens, and other furry blobs that are totally just normal. Welcome to space!” Not a whole lot of background is given to them at first, just cursory descriptions and a few little bits and pieces to explain why they can all speak to each other. As the book goes on, more about the universe and its varying species are explained, but by then I was so in love with all the characters (alien and human alike) I wasn’t too bothered about plausibility.

Honestly, none of the above is a critique on the book or the author, it’s just me being weird about aliens that aren’t Klingons.

As of this post, I’m about a quarter through the book and I’m enjoying the heck out of it. It’s starting to see a lot more action and several twists and turns so I’m really looking forward to seeing where it goes. Thanks to my Secret Santa over at Fantastic Book Dragon for finally sending me on my way to that small angry planet!

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Have you read this book or the rest of the series? What are your thoughts? Let me know in the comments!