To Be Taught, If Fortunate

Yes! This is how you do a near future sci-fi!

The story follows the tale of an early set of space explorers conducting one of the first manned extra-solar missions to planets where life can be found. The sense of wonder and the possible is palpable throughout the story, with a constant challenge of what forms life could take, recognizing the nature of common ancestors has perhaps limited the variety on earth. The imagination is wild and the scenes produced believable.

The technology used by the astronauts has a root very much in current technology lending it an air of believability. The communication with earth takes years because with electromagnetic based communication like we currently have that is what it would take. The sense of detachment this generates is ultimately central to the plot.

I loved this book, it was extremely well written, offering just the right amount of hope whilst recognizing the frequent failings of our current civilization

Becky Chambers' mom is an astrobiologist (yes, I'm jealous, too) and they worked together to imagine how spacefaring might work in this world. I love super-realistic space stories and there are so few of them, without ansibles and hyperspace drives. To Be Taught leans in to the boundaries of the speed of light. There is no going home, there is no instantaneous communication with earth, light years away. There is the claustrophobic feeling of being with the only humans who come from the same era as you, of being years away from hearing a response to your question. How do people cope with that? How does a society build up an astronaut plan and a culture to accept that? These are the fascinating questions of space travel and Chambers doesn't flinch from them.

Review originally posted on Geeky Galaxy.

I closed this book and actually said “No!” out loud. You know why? The book ends with a question. My answer to the question wasn't no. My yelling no is because I'm never going to know the answer to said question. And I'm asking myself if that means there never was an answer to the question, or if we just never find out the answer. Yes. That's a whole paragraph of me talking about the final few sentences of the book. I could probably write a whole novel in response to this book. But I won't. Instead, see below my trying to sum up how much I adored this book, without actually writing a novel.

The Plot

Aside from the ending, which I explained above, I adored the narrative style of To Be Taught, If Fortunate. It's told in a sort of after-action report. If reports were more casual and more human. It's as if the main character sat down, wrote up the goings-on, and sent it off to Earth in the hopes of it being read. And I loved that. Writing that makes me consider the ending again, there's no answer to the question because it's up to us to answer it. I'm just annoyed I won't get to read what happens next. And I really need to know what happens next.

The World

Here's the trick with this book, it's a study of four different worlds. And Becky Chambers manages to explain each one in such a way that I could imagine exactly what the planet was like, what the characters were feeling due to planetary conditions. For the most part, the environment is described without express emotion, but I somehow still embraced a sense of wonder that came with each discovery. It's like I wasn't reading fiction, and was enjoying the writings of someone who had actually been responsible for aiding in cataloguing life on other planets. It was amazing.

The Characters

Becky Chambers has a knack for characters. Despite the science, the planets, the technology, it all comes back to the four characters this whole thing is centred on. It's how these planets impact them, their thoughts, how they cope with environments, how they find joy in the little things, and deal with adversity. This whole thing is character-driven right up until the end, where Becky Chambers makes you a character, the reader makes the ultimate decision. And damn, I loved and hated that.

I'm not going to break the characters down like I normally do. I loved all of them. Despite this being a report of sorts, the characters personalities shone through and they're each unique and so fun to read about. You need to read this (and it's super short, so it won't take too long!) to really grasp how Becky Chambers manages to work her magic with these characters.

I should probably stop rambling now! Have you read this novella? What'd you think?

I found it hard when starting this book to read through all the full pages of text. There is very little dialogue and especially the beginning is very stream of consciousness / info dump. But when it kicked off a bit I could really get into the story. 

Somehow all Becky Chambers books end in this sort of open/closed ending. Where you could technically say it ended in a satisfactory way and yet you still don't know anything. Its brilliant and frustrating simultaneously. 

I loved the mix of science and story with the big emotional evolution of the characters. Excellent

“Life in isolation is a death sentance”

This book both filled me with joy and absolutely terrified me. The whole chapter with the space rats.... nope, never want to experience that ever. My favourite place as definitely Aecor, maybe because it was the longest chapter but I really enjoyed it

The characters were really cool and I wish we got to know them better. I loved each of their different personalities and they worked well to balance each other out. The whole space system/technology was really well thoughts out

Turns out I own “A long way to a small, angry, planet” so I will be reading that at some point as it seems (?) to be part of a series. Either way I love Becky's writing style in both this and her Monk and Robot series and while they are vasty different they are both enjoyable and a great read :)

This book was really great... right up until the end. It's beautifully written, and it's a good book, but my personal preference is for less... ambiguous endings. I don't need EVERYTHING tied up in a neat bow, but I really don't like “Lady and the Tiger” endings. That's simply personal preference though. Otherwise the book was so great, that the ending was proportionally disappointing to me.

This was... beautiful. Everything about it was beautiful. From the writing, to the richness of Chambers's imagination, to the in-depth character work - this book was close to perfection. I pretty much finished this in one sitting over just 2-3 hours because I couldn't put it down.

Besides reading, I'm also a bit of an astronomy nut but I've never been much into sci-fi for whatever reason. I first started getting into it after finally picking up The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet recently and thoroughly loving it, so I decided to give this one a go as well and it blew me away.

In her acknowledgements, Chambers disclaims that she's not a scientist which I was honestly pretty surprised by. She weaves in some pretty great science into this work, although granted I'm merely an amateur in astronomy so I wouldn't know if it's perfect science or up to date enough. Later she explains that her mom is an astrobiologist and then that all made sense.

What I particularly loved is how carefully Chambers avoids anthropomorphizing possible alien life or adopting any kind of human-centric view of the universe. I find that too many sci-fi works, especially those that deal with aliens and other worlds, assumes that human-like creatures (by that definition, I mean vertebrates with two eyes, one mouth, one nose) dwell on Earth-like planets most of the time which is pretty narrow and boring for the plethora of possibilities in the Universe. Chambers apparently feels the same way and she blasts these preconceived templates out of the water with this one.

Chambers's writing was also so smooth to read. The scientific bits of this book was delivered with just enough delicacy to be both instructive and enlightening, while also being easy to digest and entertaining. She manages to build these alien worlds (at least a glimpse of them from the relatively short time our Lawki 6 crew spend on these planets) in a way that each brought new things and experiences and lessons to the table. Chambers also manages to weave in some mystery into a story that is ultimately about stepwise exploration. We know Lawki 6's trajectory from the start - they are visiting 4 alien planets/moon that orbit around a faraway red dwarf star - but Chambers masterfully injects an element of mystery and uncertainty that kept me going and propelled me to finish this in one sitting.

As I already knew from Small, Angry Planet, Chambers really shines with her characters. This may be a short novella and there's only a grand total of four characters in the whole book, but we are inexplicably attached to each of them as the story goes on. Ariadne, in particular, is one of the rare protagonists that I can root for and feel so much empathy with, particularly the bit at the end of the chapter Ocean, where she almost succumbs to that astrophysical nihilism and let herself drift away to her death amongst the stars. That was an amazing moment to me and just oh so poignant.

What are you waiting for? Whatever your reading preferences, this book has something for everyone and I'd highly recommend it.

I wanted to read this book after listening to it. In part because I couldn't remember the ending, and in part because books with depth require more thought on my part, which audiobooks don't afford as well. 

I enjoyed the science in this fiction, but more so the human experience. It seems that each planet could correlate to a different stage of our lives and how we respond to them. Each in our own unique ways. This may not be the intent of Chambers, but it is what this book has sparked in me. Whether on this world or another, the question that faces us daily is how to navigate this life. What do we use it for? And is our life of value, even if it doesn't have a commercial value? Or become a person who is off global or national influence? Most importantly, how do we treat others? How do we show them respect and honor their lives? 

I love books that get me thinking about deeper things and this one does just that. 

Mmmm, I love it when you talk nerdy to me. Blend it with meaningful human connection and I'm all yours. This is the most scientifically literate work I've read by Chambers, and it's exquisite. Four beautiful, complex characters (one trans, one ace!) in a loving polycule, all of them committed to an achingly lonely mission of searching for extrasolar life... and no human yet has experienced this level of commitment, in which the Earth you return to—if you return—will be unrecognizable. The emotions of leaving your home and loved ones behind could merit a book in themselves, and are not the main focus here, but Chambers does a respectable job with them.

There are big plot holes: crowdfunding six deep-space missions, uh, not likely. Onboard fuel and energy. And, four planets, with only one landing site each? That goes into “inconceivable”[1] territory. But the story wouldn't work otherwise, and oh, how the story works. The bioadaptation gimmick is fascinating; the exotic life forms tantalizing, the moral dilemmas heartbreaking. And, finally, this is Chambers, so her characters are on the too-good-to-be-true side (virtuous, decent, flawed but self-aware and self-correcting) and I just love that. It gives me hope for what we can be.

[1] “You keep using that word.”