the long way to a small angry planet - 83% review

i know i already talked about this but. i feel like i didn't do it justice last time. i loved seeing how sissix let down her walls and became fully herself-- especially with rosemary acting as audience surrogate and just kind of enumerating the differences and appreciating them as fully alien. ive been thinking about this concept a lot where it's like... something something science fiction serves as a venue to highlight concepts already present in society and push them to an extreme so that they feel alien, so that they can be examined more closely and without "oh everyone does that" as a bias inhibiting real analysis. ive been thinking a lot about feather families, about aandrisk culture as a whole. the model of found family, of committing to offspring and raising them into curious people, of valuing people and their ideas moreso than valuing life given legs. of course, it's different when examining human children, because kids very much have ideas of their own and are people from the moment they start observing the world they're born into. but the rest of it? like. i dont feel like any of the rest of aandrisk culture contradicts a version of the human world that could exist. the idea that you're expected to leave your home (to go off to uni) and become your own person. the idea that you can choose the family you grow into (roommates) as you form your opinions based on lived experiences. with a little queer extrapolation, you get fluid polycules and cottagecore communes. those are spaces that already exist in the world and are dynamic and, from what i've seen, genuinely refreshing places to live, existing in defiance of an overarching system but also putting a lens of optimism, of living with the land, of choosing who you surround yourself with and how you apply your time, on top of such a stark act of rebellion. to have a life.

i mean, i was just thinking about how many internet spaces i've been part of, navigating long distance friend/relationships throughout the years, finding people who Got Me in a way my parents could not, and yeah, losing friends as our interests changed and diverged. getting ghosted when drama reared its ugly head. finding solace in friendships, new and rejuvenated, always always trying to bridge the gap between how i wanted to feel and how people around me made me feel. it may have been exclusively digital, but i could with certainty call those groups, and the journeying between them, as equivalent to feather families and their natural dissolution over time. i'm going to be thinking about this concept for a long, long time.

am i a little surprised about the events that followed between sissix and rosemary? yeah, although that's partially intentional due to the narration pov being sissix's and not rosemary's. we were supposed to discover it together. but i also just like... don't really recall that being part of rosemary's characterization? i never would have clocked that. i don't even know if i would clock it now, knowing what to look for. i wish there had been something to build up that anticipatory like.. crush? phase? more? but i guess that wasn't the focus of that little vignette. like i'm happy for them or whatever but it does really feel like two players at the table just kind of announced that this was happening at the top of the session and the gm was just like "alright, yeah okay sure. um. so. let's have that conversation. where does this discussion happen" and then that's kind of that.

and then there's the matter regarding ohan. i haven't gotten to the resolution of this yet, but i'm. processing how it would feel to be them. like. to have a little voice in my head that tells me i have to let it take over so that i can do cool math? and that payment for being able to see literally how space moves and the idk galatic forces that play into it is letting it slowly kill me? i can see why it's such a precious space for ohan to be in. the fear of committing to the death of the one for the salvation of the other when the two of you are so intertwined. and sissix's reaction to the whole thing really. kind of hammers home the other half of the equation. that it is those things but it is also very clearly a disease that is smothering out the life of its host. i'm not sure i agree with sissix, but i am glad she cared enough to try to get involved.

anyway. the rest is sort of hard to put on a timeline. like, i like this book a lot and i'm sure i'll revisit it many times over the years, but man does this book truly feel like a handful of vignettes without a real sense of time passing. it's just the moments that were noteworthy. i think that's why it feels so much like a summation of a ttrpg campaign. you know how sometimes you roleplay and it's just like, a means of getting to the next big thing? and then sometimes you roleplay and you're putting your whole entire pussy into acting out your character's impulses and reactions and letting the conversation swell and become this huge memorable thing that expresses not just your character's desires or the conflict of the moment, but some bigger question of what kind of world would have to exist to make this conflict come to a head and make you, of all people, have to weigh in on the decision at hand? yeah. this book feels like a collection of these latter moments. /pos