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Why are all of the alt history stories like "what if history, but worse?" Sure, that makes figuring out the conflict pretty easy, but I feel like I've seen "south won the civil war" and "germany won a world war" enough times I don't need to see it again.

Where is "the enslaved peoples of the South took a cue from Haiti and revolted, kicking out or exterminating the plantation owners and forming their own independent country"? How about "the US didn't win independence until long after Britain abolished slavery"?

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?