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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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I've seen this book compared to Becky Chambers. I haven't read any of Becky Chambers's books, but they sound exactly like the kind of story I am not interested in (people go to space, have problems which they solve by talking them out in a civilized fashion, the end?).

Based on your review (and having read Chambers), I would guess that the similarity is that both authors very obviously were aiming to write something that exemplified their politics, with telling a good story (or really telling a story at all) being secondary.

In The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, you cannot go more than a chapter without Chambers going out of her way to inject her politics into the book in a very unsubtle way. Neopronouns all over the place is one example, but worse still is that Chambers doesn't just insert them into the world and let the reader draw his own conclusions. She actually has a scene where the main character has an internal monologue about how she calls some alien "xe", because she doesn't know how gender works for that species and using "xe" is just what Good People do when they don't know someone's gender. Never mind that a character who believes that wouldn't consciously tell themselves to do it (they would just act out their beliefs), Becky Chambers wants you to know how she thinks Good People should act no matter how awkward it makes the scene.

It's like that all over the place in the book. Throughout the whole thing, it's hard to not spot the signs that Chambers wanted to preach, not tell a story. And your review here gives me very much the same vibe.