To Be Taught, If Fortunate
{5/5} “As an astronaut, you know conceptually that you’re going to another world, that you’re going to see alien life. You know this, and yet there is nothing that can prepare you for it. It’s going to the zoo and seeing an animal you’ve never heard of. It’s seeing footage of a deep sea jelly whose body shape makes you feel as though you’re going mad.”
To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers, published in 2019
Ariadne is part of a small spaceship crew investigating four potentially habitable worlds in orbit around Zhenyi. When she wakes up from 28 years of torpor, she rolls a die to become the 1st one to set foot on Aecor. Soon they discover something that glows moving beneath the ice. They end up finding magnificent flora and fauna. They were getting 14-years-out-of-date updates from Earth every month — but then they stopped.
This is a novella about exploration, science, and the conditions under which the most well adjusted humans would go crazy.
It’s glorious.
This is the 4th book I’ve read by Chambers. I previously reviewed Record of a Spaceborn Few.