To Be Taught, If Fortunate

A less urgent, more intimate Interstellar.

Last year I had never heard of Becky Chambers. Now, five books into her work, she has become a favorite author of mine. Her ability to write beautiful, rich and cozy human experience is a constant. All her books take place in scifi settings, but the setting, the technology are ambient. Her stories focus so much more on characters over the alien. More intimate inter-personal stories than action heavy plot. I guess you could say they tend to lean into the slice-of-life genre.

To Be Taught, If Fortunate lives up to what I have grown to expect from Becky Chambers, but with a more beautiful, somber, bitter-sweet execution. It stands apart from what I’ve read of the Wayfarer series, which started out a little too much in the vein of Firefly. Not quite as openly light-hearted philosophical as A Psalm for the Wild-Built. It’s a short novella that takes you on a journey with four people over a few decades. It’s not perfect. The ending might be devisive. I really enjoyed reading it.