"To Be Taught, If Fortunate" by Becky Chambers

This story chronicles the activities of four astronauts as they catalogue the life on four planets, light years from Earth.  The plan is to catalogue the planets and then return to Earth.

This is a gentle, slow paced book, packed with detail of the day-to-day life of four people doing science, and maintaining their space craft, on alien worlds.

There is no peril.  There are no fights.  There is no conflict.

The two mechanisms that enable this adventure are: suspended animation (”torpor”) during space flight, which is fair enough; and “somaforming”, which allows the people to adapt to the environment, rather than needing to adapt the environment to the people.  The latter is an interesting concept that I hadn’t come across before.  There is no physics-defying magic that allows the astronauts to travel (or communicate) faster than light, so distance from Earth, and the time it takes communication to travel either way, is also a character in the story.

Nothing really happens.

The descriptions of the activity of doing science and the day-to-day social interactions of four astronauts in a moderately confined space are detailed and thoughtful.  There is a grounded sense of reality to what they are doing.

This is a novella, so there is little opportunity to explore many things in detail.  The impact of torpor and somaforming are briefly explored, and the character development is enough to get a sense of four different people, but no more than that.  The narrative space that this leaves is filled with description of the activities of the astronauts, and this description is quite engaging.  There is a real sense of “doing science”, and the author has gone to some lengths to describe a few niche pieces of science that crop up on the four planets - although this can feel a bit like a TED talk at times, when I felt like I was being educated rather than told a story.

So if you’re happy with sci-fi that focusses on description rather than plot or character, then this may be for you.  Personally, while I appreciated the detail and the sense of gentle activity that I felt throughout the book, I found that ultimately I didn’t really care about the people or their situation.  So my rating for this book has more to do with my subjective experience than the quality of the writing.  This book may be for you.  It just wasn’t for me.

My rating: ✦✦✦✧✧