To Be Taught, If Fortunate

A short read about space exploration in search of other life forms. Some interesting thoughts about ethical science, and some imaginative world building. But overall it's a bit thin and ends in an unsatisfying way that feels a little forced.

Almost leisurely until the not-intensity-but-something-like-it slams into you. Like a mirror rushing towards you but it's a mirror so you don't really see it coming and it hits you and shatters and you're left stunned, looking through broken reflections to the beyond, wondering where to go from here.

The kind of book you need take a long walk after reading, or perhaps a good cry (though you're not really sure why).

Science fiction like only Becky Chambers does it.

It is wonderful. I love the characters and I could really feel the ups and downs with them. The description of the sci-fi science was also very interesting and plausible in my opinion.

One of the books where I'm very sad when it's over and can't stop thinking about it for quite a while.

Unlike the super-high-tech far future of her Wayfarers series, Chambers focuses on just the near-future of the human race. Seen from a team of exoplanet explorers surveying alien life, To Be Taught paints a future where governments fail in the mission to space but the human spirit leads ordinary people to crowdfund the mission instead. And when the interstellar mission outlasts human lifespans, government lifespans and even societal lifespans, Chambers leaves us with a deeply personal question, ask from both her perspective and that of the protagonist, chronologically ancient, barely human and too distant to ever return home: how much is space exploration worth?