I looked her up on Goodreads. The writing style is workmanlike and rather didactic, which is hardly unexpected. It's heavily slanted towards the conventional neoliberal, socially progressive position, unsurprisingly. The thrust appears to be that boundless diversity of species, race within species, sexual expression and so on will produce a state somewhat less diverse than our own; all of the rainbow people, aliens and holograms are, by some extreme coincidence, rather like middle class Southern Californians. I've seen
Starship Troopers...
The bit that really rankled, however, was this extract from
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet:
“Jenks walked around the bench, standing where Ashby could see him.
“Hi,” he said.
Ashby turned his head. “Hi.”
Jenks upturned the tub. The bolts clattered to the floor like heavy rain. “These are several hundred bolts. They are all different shapes and sizes, and Kizzy always keeps them in one communal tub. It drives me crazy.”
Ashby blinked. “Why are they on the floor?”
“Because we are going to sort them. We are going to sort them into nice, neat little piles. And then we’re going to take those piles and put them in smaller tubs, so that when I need a bolt, I don’t have to go digging.”
“I see.” Ashby blinked again. “Why are we doing this?”
“Because she jackass dumped them all over the floor, and they have to be cleaned up. And if they have to be cleaned up, we might as well sort them while we’re at it.” Jenks sat down, leaning comfortably against a planter. He began to pick through the bolts. “See, my best friend in the whole galaxy is currently on another ship, holed up in a wall, disarming hackjob explosives. … I want to do
something, and it’s driving me…crazy that I can’t. I can’t even
smoke because there are Aeluons around. So, fine. I’m going to sort bolts.” He swung his eyes up to Ashby. “And I think anybody who has similar feelings should join me.”
― Becky Chambers
'Kizzy' is supposed to be the best damn starship engineer in the whole of the known universe. Well of course she is. Everyone's the best damn something in the whole known somewhere; the place is a veritable blizzard of special snowflakes.
But back to the point: no engineer worth his or her salt would store bolts of different sizes in a single container. They have to be segregated by size and type because the engineer or mechanic needs to be able to find the right one in a hurry. Anyone who has ever made or done anything, from needlework to nuclear physics knows that it's vital to store things properly and in order. The same goes for clerical tasks, paperwork, archiving and so on.
Jenks, the male dullard, is dead right. The bolts need to be sorted by size and put into individual trugs.
The point here is that Kizzy Shao is supposed to be portrayed as a 'free spirit' who doesn't have time for mundane things such as sorting bolts by size. The reality, however, is that she wouldn't be like that if she really was the best damn engineer in the galaxy. What we end up with, therefore, is a completely wasted opportunity. We could have had a well done female engineer who inspires female readers to look at the subject in a new way. Instead we have a badly drawn slave to whacky characterisation, who ends up completely off piste and having to adopt a position inferior to the male because he is right in his approach to the problem. Ergo it's sexist. Bleech.
www.wired.com
