SciFi Novella Review: To Be Taught If Fortunate by Becky Chambers

To Be Taught If Fortunate by Becky Chambers:

Becky Chambers' Wayfarer series has been one of my favorite works of SF since I got back into the genre - character focused with lovely characters, featuring an optimistic universe of cohabitation and ideas extending that optimism toward an interesting and worthwhile future.  So naturally I tried to pick up her latest work, this novella To Be Taught If Fortunate, as soon as it came out....only to find out that a bunch of others had the same idea, so it took until this week for me to get it.  And then I finished it in one day, so you know, of course.

It's a bit of a different type of work than the Wayfarer series in some ways, but not others.  This is a novella that features a far more near future - about a hundred years or so - featuring a group of scientists exploring other planets and cataloging the environments and life found on those planets.  Like the Wayfarer series, it features a crew who are dedicated to their jobs and try to cooperate together to ensure those jobs are done well, with rivalries between the crew non-existent and collaboration being as natural as breathing.  Unlike the series however, the book deals with more clear ethical and moral questions, and while optimistic at heart, it holds less answers.

It's a fascinating piece of work that I definitely recommend.





Plot Summary:  Ariadne O'Neill is one of the four crewmembers of Lawki 6, a mission to explore and catalog the environments and life of four exoplanets surrounding the star Zhenyi: the ice moon Aecor, the heavy gravity planet Mirabilis, the water planet Opera, and the tidally locked world Votum.  The crew depends upon a technology devloped in the late 21st century/early 22nd, called Somaforming, which alters their own bodies to fit the needs they will have to survive on each planet.  For each planet, the crew is supposed to set down, and without interfering take scientific notes of the atmosphere, the biological life found there (if any), and any other aspects of the planet with scientific interest.  But as the crew goes from each world to the other, they begin to ask questions about the value and ethics of what they're doing, about the science they're performing, and whether that science is merely selfish or truly good for the people left behind on Earth, all those years ago....

Thoughts:    This book takes a plotline that may remind some readers of say "Interstellar" but actually uses that plot to deal with issues that are actually interesting and well done.  It helps that Chambers remains a master of characters - in this case, they're simply the four members of the crew, who all agree on the importance of collaboration and trying to do science, but each react to adversity in slightly different ways, and the book uses that to deal with the loneliness of isolation, the feeling of one's self in one's body (as exemplified by the changes to each characters' body due to the somaforming), to the meaning of "home" and relationships.

And perhaps most importantly, although all of the above is dealt with in pretty complete fashion, to ask a question about the purpose of science, and about the impacts it has.  Who is such science for?  Is it really for the good of all, or is it selfish to go forward, especially when the people the science is supposed to be helping may not actually want it or could use other helps?  This latter question has hit real life people before, with the Apollo space program for example derided by many as money spent on something not helpful while others could've used the money back on Earth.  And the question about scientific impact is a classic one of the genre, and one that is felt by every type of explorer throughout history.

Chambers manages to give each of these questions a voice, as she shows us the crew dealing with 4 very different and fantastic worlds - with her writing giving the reader as much excitement as the cast has upon encountering them.  It's a phenomenal work for such a short piece of writing (it's definitely a novella), and while the book doesn't have clear answers for anybody, it manages to never feel like its cutting out any of its exploration of these questions, while remaining riveting throughout.  Highly recommended.