Everyday Heroism and the Journey of the Community in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

Authors

Jari Käkelä, University of HelsinkiFollow

Document Type

Article

Abstract

This article examines the impact of everyday heroism on community in the science fiction novel The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (2014) by Becky Chambers. While science fiction often features superhuman action or scientist heroes and technocratic dystopian futures, Chambers’s novel represents the recent trend of hopepunk, which sets stories within mundane social interactions to imagine gradual positive change. Instead of its action-adventure potential, the narrative in Chambers’s novel focuses on the relationships between a multi-species crew of a spaceship, creating a heightened sense of the crew as a found family where individuals come to accept and support each other – and in this way, the story centers around the journey of the community towards equality, inclusion, and hope. I argue that the everyday heroism in the novel is transparent but highly prosocial, overall resulting in a representation of everyday heroism as a way to imagine more hopeful futures.

DOI

10.26736/hs.2024.01.06

Recommended Citation

Käkelä, Jari (2024) "Everyday Heroism and the Journey of the Community in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers," Heroism Science: Vol. 9: Iss. 1, Article 5.
DOI: 10.26736/hs.2024.01.06
Available at: https://scholarship.richmond.edu/heroism-science/vol9/iss1/5