To Be Taught, If Fortunate

To Be Taught, If Fortunate takes its title from the greeting recorded for the Voyager probes in 1977, which offered to teach and to be taught; Becky Chambers published the novella in 2019. Ariadne tells the story in the form of letters to the people of Earth, addressing her readers directly and explaining what her crew is doing as she goes.

The science at the centre of the book is somaforming, a technique that rewrites an astronaut's biology to suit the world in front of them, so the crew grow antifreeze in their blood on a cold planet or adapt to heavier gravity instead of carrying a habitat for every eventuality. Chambers sends them to four worlds in turn and gives each one its own ecology, some of it beautiful and some entirely indifferent to being studied.

The novella's real subject is what four researchers owe the civilisation that funded them and what their work is worth if nobody at home is listening. Chambers wrote it wanting to put ordinary working scientists at the centre of a story set in space, and the questions the crew argue about are the practical ones: whether to continue, whether to turn back, and who gets to decide. The four of them are colleagues rather than heroes, and the book is as interested in how they get along as in what they find.