Review: To Be Taught, If Fortunate

To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When I read the SF of the late 1960s and early 1970s (I promise this will become relevant in a second), I notice the obsession with sex (particularly with multiple partners), drugs, and war - the preoccupations of the counterculture at the time. These topics haven't ceased to be important, of course, but they've ceased to be things that are very consciously in the foreground of most SF. I suspect that, in the period of the New Wave, you weren't taken seriously in certain circles if you didn't chuck in at least two out of three of those topics in a way that showed you were thinking about them really a lot, and that your thoughts were, for the time, radical.

Fifty years later, the topics have changed, but the performance has not. Now it's a diversity bingo card that you have to fill out, to show that you're thinking about race, gender, sexual orientation, and other aspects of identity (such as disability or class), and you're thinking about these topics in a particular way. Once those credentials are established, you can move on and tell your story, often without the characters' identity ever becoming relevant to how it unfolds.

I know that it's important to tell stories about people who just have these identities without the story being about that; representation matters, and just being able to see yourself in a character is sometimes enough. At the same time, this book feels like it takes a quick scene to establish that yes, this is a diverse crew; not only do their names suggest that their ethnic origin is African, Asian, European and probably Latina, but they are, respectively, asexual, trans, bi/pan/poly, and lesbian. And then, credentials established, the story moves on and is not only not about any of that, but is pretty much completely unaffected by any of it. Which, in itself, is perhaps signalling a future in which none of this is a big deal in any way. So I'm in two minds about whether it was just an exercise in box-checking, or a way of quietly allowing people with a wide range of identities to feel represented and then showing us a future in which nobody makes a fuss about any of that (which, I hope, is the future we're headed for).

Anyway, setting that aside: the story itself. Or rather, the lack of much story. One thing the author gets right that a lot of SF gets wrong is that the astronaut crew get on extremely well together; astronauts are carefully selected from people who play well with others, and trained to be part of a functional team that can disagree about things, even passionately, but then reach consensus with no hard feelings. That's what we see here. Unfortunately, part of the reason (apart perhaps from ignorance) that a lot of authors don't give us that is that more conflict makes for a more interesting story.

There is a very slow-burn arc here; it's not completely without a plot, though a good 95% of it could be summed up as, "So, hey, science is nifty," written for people who don't science much. The several planets the crew explores create different moods and experiences in them as individuals and as a crew, so we do get to see that, and the description is well done and engaging (which it needs to be, in order to keep our interest). And there is that very slow plot, as the messages from Earth reveal that things have gone extremely badly in the time the crew have been gone (mostly in suspended animation and time dilation). So badly, in fact, that I question the frequent description of this author's work as "optimistic". She's optimistic about small groups of people, true, but comes across as quite pessimistic about large groups and the fate of Earth as a whole. (Unduly pessimistic, I feel; the particular apocalyptic scenario used in this book - like most apocalyptic scenarios, frankly - is not, in reality, likely to be world-ending. The world is full of clever people who can bring us back from things like that.)

The whole, to me, doesn't quite add up to a story. It has its strengths, definitely; an engaging voice, an ensemble cast who ensemble well, wonderful descriptions, a philosophical point of view that's put across effectively, a bit of a tug at various heartstrings on the way. For me, though, it didn't completely work. And some parts of it I don't expect will age well.

View all my reviews