Review: To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers

To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Publication Date: September 3, 2019


Becky Chambers is one of those writers whose star in the science fiction world definitely seems to be waxing, so when I got the chance to review a shorter work of hers, I was excited to give it a whirl. I'd picked up her debut The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet a while back, only to put it down a quarter way through; not because it was bad---it seemed well-written---but because something about the plot, the voice, just didn't grab me. I always intended to pick it back up, but . . . well, the world is vast and so is my TBR pile. "I'll pick it up again tomorrow," I told myself, and of course tomorrow never came.

To Be Taught, If Fortunate is a standalone novella, following four astronauts sent on a crowdfunded deep-space exploration mission to explore a series of worlds light-years away from Earth. Via our narrator Ariadne, we follow the joys and heartbreaks of their discoveries, the introspective and social narrations of their interpersonal conflicts, and we sit silently beside them as the slow, creeping realization hits that, back home on Earth, something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.

There's a lot to like here. The worldbuilding is fantastic and the writing is vivid; that perfect exhilaration, that crucial sense of wonder, is tangible whenever the story delves into the team's scientific adventures. Chambers isn't one of those authors who writes about a scientific expedition but handwaves away the science, which I really enjoyed. Many sci-fi authors can get tedious in those portions, but that never happens here, and that alone bumped this up a star.

There are flaws, however. For a foursome that never has any conflict rising above the level of passive aggressiveness, there's a bit too much introspection here, or so I felt. Some of those parts dragged a bit. And part of the ending, I thought, followed a logic stream that I found completely unrealistic. It kind of pulled me out of the story, because they end up making a decision that just seemed utterly bizarre to me. (And the fact that our narrator spends so much time explaining it . . . that that was necessary in the first place is a hint that the decision itself doesn't flow naturally from what came before it.)

But ultimately, that was probably a minor thing. Melancholy and vibrant simultaneously, To Be Taught, If Fortunate made me wonder if I should pick The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet up again. I think I probably will.

A big thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review.