To Be Taught If Fortunate

To Be Taught, If Fortunate

By Becky Chambers

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 subzero 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 journey to neighboring exoplanets long known to harbor life.

A team of these explorers, Ariadne O’Neill and her three crewmates, are hard at work in a planetary system fifteen light-years from Sol, on a mission to ecologically survey four habitable worlds. But as Ariadne shifts through both form and time, the culture back on Earth has also been transformed. Faced with the possibility of returning to a planet that has forgotten those who have left, Ariadne begins to chronicle the story of the wonders and dangers of her mission, in the hope that someone back home might still be listening.

This short novella got off to a slow start, and it was never really about the plot, but it was a nice change of pace for me at the moment.  I've been reading at a breakneck pace because all my chickens came home to roost, also known as all my library requests came in at once, even though I ordered them at different times and was on several different waiting lists.  So it's been a small frenzy here, and it's good to kind of catch my breath a little with To Be Taught.

The book, as you come to realize, is both a more-detailed-than-strictly-necessary-or-even-enjoyable description of what we might find on other habitable planets, and also a love letter to exploration, knowledge, and dreams of space.  The idea is that there are four astronauts who are on a decades-long exploration of four distant planets (or moons or something - I kind of returned the book to the library already).  When taking off, they don't expect to come back for at least eighty years.  Partway through the mission, they realize that Earth is no longer in contact with them for unknown reasons, and as they get deeper into space, and potentially closer to the mystery of Earth's silence, they have to decide why and for whom they are doing this - ultimately deciding that if Earth wants them to come back, they will come back, if Earth wants them to keep going, they will keep going, and they are prepared to wait forever for Earth to respond, since the question is too important to answer for Earth.  It's a little bittersweet, since it's pretty clear that Earth got real fucked and probably will not be responding, even if they'd wanted to. News alert, you're all going to die in stasis, how nice!

The part of the book that isn't taken up with philosophical questions about how much we owe to the human race is sort of a fun wilderness adventure.  The descriptions, as I alluded to above, are more detailed, and more scientifically accurate than I really even wanted, no doubt a side effect of the author's relying heavily on her mother's astrobiologist background.  My copy came with a short list of questions and answers between the author and her mother at the end, mostly about the interaction between science and science fiction, which I also found enlightening.

It's also managed to make me bookmark Chambers' other big work, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, which I guess is now just the first in a trilogy.  I like her style enough - and the Big Ideas she has - to get into more by her.  We'll see how it goes - honestly, the interaction between astronauts was not always my favorite part in To Be Taught.  It's hard to give enough space to relationships in a book where the main focus is on the relationship with Earth, not each other.  And also, obviously, when they spend years just collecting samples and then going to sleep for years to travel.  Well, I guess we'll just have to see.