To Be Taught, If Fortunate

A Novella

by Becky Chambers

hardcover, 160 pages

English language

Published Aug. 8, 2019 by Hodder & Stoughton.

ISBN:: 978-1-4736-9716-4

View on OpenLibrary

View on Inventaire

(60 reviews)

At the turn of the twenty-second century, scientists make a breakthrough in human spaceflight. Through a revolutionary method known as somaforming, astronauts can survive in hostile environments off Earth using synthetic biological supplementations. They can produce antifreeze in sub-zero temperatures, absorb radiation and convert it for food, and conveniently adjust to the pull of different gravitational forces. With the fragility of the body no longer a limiting factor, human beings are at last able to explore neighbouring exoplanets long suspected to harbour life.

Ariadne is one such explorer. On a mission to ecologically survey four habitable worlds fifteen light-years from Earth, she and her fellow crewmates sleep while in transit, and wake each time with different features. But as they shift through both form and time, life back on Earth has also changed. Faced with the possibility of returning to a planet that has forgotten those who have left, Ariadne …

8 editions

gdorn reviewed To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers

A deeply personal plea for space exploration funding

4 stars

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?

Jason Molenda reviewed To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers

Review of 'To Be Taught, If Fortunate' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

they visit four worlds, two fun ones and two sad ones and it's 2020 and I don't want anything sad in my head so I wasn't loving this by the end, through no fault of the author.

Sergio reviewed To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers

Review of 'To Be Taught, If Fortunate' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

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!