To Be Taught, If Fortunate

A different side of Becky Chambers, but also a welcome one.

Space exploration without the lens flare: wonder, discovery, terror, danger, boredom, some questions answered, new ones posed. This was more meditative than the Wayfarers series, more solemn, more scientific, but still offering a way of thinking about the possibilities of the universe that is as gentle as it is fresh. Her curiosity and compassion resonates throughout, just as it did in Wayfarers.

It is wonderful. I love the characters and I could really feel the ups and downs with them. The description of the sci-fi science was also very interesting and plausible in my opinion.

One of the books where I'm very sad when it's over and can't stop thinking about it for quite a while.

I really appreciated this book as much as I enjoyed it - not the same thing. I am also a sucker for the Golden Voyage disc, so that drew me in, and all of it together got me thinking deeper than most sci-fi would lead me to do. That titular bit about learning and teaching just nails it. What we do is either important or inconsequential or some mix of both… who ever knows which?

Unlike the super-high-tech far future of her Wayfarers series, Chambers focuses on just the near-future of the human race. Seen from a team of exoplanet explorers surveying alien life, To Be Taught paints a future where governments fail in the mission to space but the human spirit leads ordinary people to crowdfund the mission instead. And when the interstellar mission outlasts human lifespans, government lifespans and even societal lifespans, Chambers leaves us with a deeply personal question, ask from both her perspective and that of the protagonist, chronologically ancient, barely human and too distant to ever return home: how much is space exploration worth?

What an incredible treat this novella is. It's got everything I've come to love from Chambers' brand of sci-fi; the optimism, the character-driven narrative, the beautiful descriptions of both scientific work and imaginative new worlds that intertwine with the characters' states of mind, and more; the attention to technical details and other "hard sci-fi" aspects shocked me as they're not a huge component of the Wayfarers books nor what I look for in them, but they were a pleasant surprise and a demonstration of how Chambers still has a lot to surprise with. My only complaint is I wish it was way longer!

The novella category is always super strong for the Hugos so it really shouldn't have surprised me how much this book f'ed me up. It started off a fascinating portrayal of space exploration for science and ended up with me stuck in a book fugue. Five stars.