Becky Chambers, The Long Way etc

On the positive side (I guess it's positive?), I liked Becky Chambers' debut novel The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet a lot more than I did A Psalm for the Wild-Built.

Certainly I'm too old to start again, as a reader or as much of anything else, but I don't think I get the fandom for this book. The characters are really engaging, and the various twists we go through along the way are all mildly and appropriately gasp-inducing, and yeah, it's a book one could think with: prejudice between species (races?) and genders (and genderedness and sexualities and and and), the boundaries between life and tech (and the meaning thereof), the potentials and perils of artificial intelligence, and so on.

But also it felt a little bit like a much less weird, unBritish Douglas Adams, but without Adams' degree of weirdness and intensity of Britishness, it didn't stick. It's a serious novel, set in a universe where serious things are happening to serious people from serious sapient species/races, and yet somehow....

Look, this is a fully realized universe, and that's impressive. The dynamics between individual characters and between sapient species are intriguing, and mostly they make excellent sense. The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet has fans, lots of them with strong feelings, and I recognize that.

I'm baffled, a little bit, why this book wasn't more for me.

When I arrived yesterday at my monthly lunch with one of my longest-standing friends, he tried to present me with a copy of this book. Not only was I already reading it, but I had in fact brought it along just in case I was early, or he was late. I should've liked it more than this, is what I'm saying.

Probably you'll like it more than I did? Anyway, it's fine.