Cultural Dessert

‘To Be Taught if Fortunate’ by Becky Chambers

3 November 2022

Becky Chambers writes gentle, charming science fiction novels that imagine a multi-species universe where everyone is mostly kind and polite to each other. Through showing how beings with completely different metabolisms and methods of communication can manage to understand each other and get along, she makes us think about issues of diversity and inclusion closer to home. I would recommend her Wayfarer series of novels (starting with ‘The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet’), each of which is a completely different type of story in a completely different setting, subtly linked to the rest of the series by one or two common characters. I’ve just finished reading ‘To Be Taught if Fortunate’ - her lovely bite-sized stand-alone novella which focuses on the human crew of a spaceship on an exploratory mission which takes them many light-years, and therefore many decades, from Earth. Becky Chambers doesn’t write conventional SciFi battles, mystery or horror: she is more interested in science than fiction, thinking plausibly about how life might arise and develop on different worlds. She creates likeable characters and places them in challenging situations where they need to work together to survive.

Labels: Books

posted by Robin Simpson @ 6:01 pm