To Be Taught, If Fortunate

Having finished The Wayfarer series by this author, I wanted more of her writing and perspective. This novella hit the spot. It's fascinating, imaginative, detailed and, in the right moments, tender.

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Chikondi and I walked panting up beside them. I leaned my helmet against his arm. He offered his hand to Elena. She took it gladly. We became a molecule, distinct components attached by natural bonds.

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One can take as a given, unless shown otherwise, that the characters in her novels are kind and do their best. Her writing makes me realize how conditioned I am to believe that a person’s character will make a hard turn toward evil at any moment and how often that choice is used to move a plot along.

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We landed at night. We could see nothing out the windows, but the sounds from outside told me much. I heard the wind whipping around the inconvenient obstruction of our hull. I heard the lapping of the disturbed shallows. I heard rain drumming like impatient fingers. It was not a cosy storm, a curl-up-with-a-book-and-a-blanket storm. This was weather that resented us.

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Not so with Becky Chambers’ work. Never conforming to the standard format of a novel, she is very creative in how she adds tension to a story. It’s never that a character suddenly changes their nature, she uses small things like bad weather or no messages from home.

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The airlock opened before me, edgeless vacuity beyond. There were no winds here, no crashing waves. Only the cold constancy of stars, to which I was just a crude bit of wet carbon, a flake of skin you brush aside. My pain and pettiness and mistakes and inadequacies did not matter. I did not matter. Nothing we did out here mattered. Nothing we could or would ever do would matter, in the face of this.

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Becky Chambers has a leg up on other science fiction authors because she grew up surrounded by people who worked at NASA. Her mother is an astro-biologist and her father is a satellite engineer.

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In this short novel, Ms. Chambers asks the hard questions about the ethics of going to space. Why do we do it? Who should be able to do it? How will be react to life when we find it?

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