To Be Taught, If Fortunate, Becky Chambers (Hodder & Stoughton 978-1-473697164, £12.99, 140pp, hc) August 2019. (Harper Voyager 978-0-062-93601-1, $12.99, 176pp, tp) September 2019.

I wish I had enjoyed Becky Chambers’s To Be Taught, If Fortunate nearly as much. Where Chambers’s previous works (The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet, A Closed and Common Orbit, and Record of a Spaceborn Few) took place in her space opera Wayfarers continuity, a universe inhabited by multiple sentient species where FTL travel is relatively commonplace, To Be Taught, If Fortunate takes place in a different continuity entirely. It’s about a four-person team on a space exploration mission that’s going to take them 50 years away from Earth, with a 14-year-each-way time lag for communications, from a crowd-funded organisation dedicated to low-impact exploration, even as resources on Earth get tighter and tighter.

There are a lot of things that Chambers does well in this novella: her depiction of the small, family-close team (of different genders and sexualities) and their relationships; the changes they undergo as individuals and as a team as they spend more and more time on their mission; the joy in discovery and the hard work of science in the field; and the various different technologies they use to make their mission possible. Ultimately, though, I find the question the characters are posed (and the one they pose) at the novella’s conclusion to be less rich in meaning than I believe Chambers intended for it to be. Mostly, my reaction to the characters’ choice at the end of the novella is to find it an abrogation of their responsibil­ity to themselves and to other humans, to be puzzled and vaguely irritated – and I don’t think that’s the novella’s intent.

Still, Chambers on an off day writes a lovely, gentle, uncompromisingly character-centred piece of work that’s better than some writers do at their best, so To Be Taught, If Fortunate is entirely worth a read.

This review and more like it in the September 2019 issue of Locus.

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