The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Becky Chambers's first science fiction novel, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, appeared in 2014. She self-published it through a Kickstarter campaign before it was re-published by Hodder & Stoughton, and it belongs to the Wayfarers books, which share a setting but not the same cast. It takes place in the Galactic Commons.

Rosemary Harper signs on with the crew of the Wayfarer, a patched-up ship that bores tunnels through space for other people to travel through, because she wants a job far from her past. The crew is a mix of species: a captain who worries about money, a reptilian pilot, a doctor who also cooks, two engineers who bicker constantly, and the ship's own artificial intelligence. She signs on as a file clerk rather than as anything more glamorous.

They take a contract to open a tunnel to a planet that is joining the Galactic Commons, on the far side of a long stretch of nothing. The voyage gives everyone aboard time to work out what they are to each other, and it takes them past a succession of alien environments before they arrive.

Chambers writes the book as a series of episodes rather than a single plot, and it was followed by further novels set in the same universe with largely different characters. The first volume establishes the Wayfarer, its crew and the politics of the Galactic Commons.