Becky Chambers’ To Be Taught, If Fortunate is a wonderful and ethereal-feeling story about time and connection, but it’s mostly a speculative book about science, which is part of why I liked it so much. You’ll see this as we keep going, eventually. Terrible fantasy is my jam more than anything, but I absolutely adore speculative science. Technically speculative is a whole part of the genre "science fiction," but what I mean is I adore stories that are about science. Not just new and inventive biology or technology or whatnot, but about the act of science. I plan on reviewing Into the Drowning Deep later and I'll go into more detail on that one, but suffice to say. This is a genre that I absolutely adore. And so I say that I know what I'm talking about when I say that speculative science fiction can be really bad if it's not done right. It's a hard genre to do!
To Be Taught, If Fortunate is not really bad. It is really good. I really, really liked this book.
The story is this: There are four crewmembers aboard the Merian, a spaceship bound for four different moons light-years away from Earth. There’s Ariadne, the engineer (she's the POV), Chikondi, the biologist, Jack, the geologist, and Elena, most experienced of all four and as far as I can tell just a general expert. The Merian is part of the space mission Lawki 6 and their mission is to study these planets and their ecosystems over a period of years. These four crewmates are from the get-go obviously incredibly close to one another, and their relationship is one of the highlights of the book for me. They all care so much, unconditionally, and I personally think it's well-written. Ariadne is writing a letter chronicling their story, from when they left through all four moons of their mission, and trying to send it to Earth in hopes of a response. That letter forms the whole of the novella, and it's a bit over 200 pages in all (or at least it was in my e-book copy).
Ariadne talks about a lot of things, and my favorite part is when she describes the science and the science process aboard the Merian. She’s somewhat of a layman, so there’s plenty of points where she happily admits she doesn’t have the expertise to properly describe, but she’s also very involved in the science process and an an engineer, so at any engineering points she’s obviously very excited to explain, and at certain points of the discovery process that she’s personally involved in, she’s quite excited to explain those too. The speculative biology in the book isn’t the most creative that I’ve seen, but it’s more then made up for by the use of the scientific method around it. One planet, Mirabilis, has what essentially is described as a perfectly normal landscape, save for the fact that the colors of the grass, trees, and sky are swapped— but what makes it interesting is the scientists’ excitement at how to classify each aspect of it. The grass isn’t technically grass, and the trees aren’t really trees, and the sky is colored like that because of the atmosphere, and how are they going to classify this if it isn’t a plant or a rock, et cetera. It’s a fantastic way of making up for the novella’s shortcomings.
The conflict in the book, with a bit of a departure from the usual kind of speculative science, does not come from the crewmembers or from the various planets they're on-- it comes from the timescale that they are on. The crew, to make space travel easier on them, enters a state called torpor-- cryosleep, essentially, though the novella does go into pretty decent detail on how it differs-- while they travel, as the spacetravel can take them years to get from moon to moon. In addition to that, they're expected to stay a few years-- I think four-- on each moon to get long-term data. Which means that in total, their mission is expected to last eighty years. And they have no instantaneous communication-- Ariadne's first sentence, give or take, tells whoever's reading her letter that it would have taken fourteen years for it to reach from her moon to Earth. Earth continues to spin without them— the crew’s only news from home is sporadic updates from Earth, always received years out of date due to the time it takes to send them. Politics and news change rapidly. Elena’s hometown is destroyed without her there to see it. And a solar storm ravages the Earth, after which neither Earth nor a second Lawki crew that returned to investigate them ever contacts them again. To Be Taught has the crew toe the thin line between companionship and loneliness, and keeps their feelings on the matter complex without feeling too shallow. There is hardly any aspect that is not well-done, and what is not well-done is augmented with other, better parts of the book.
It's a good story. It's a really good story. I absolutely believe, even if you've read through my spoilery review, it is worth a read.
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