Apprendre, si par bonheur

An astronaut chronicles her mission to far-flung worlds, and desperately hopes that someone reads it.

I didn't enjoy this as much as I've relished previous chambers novels. Perhaps it was the novella format, or maybe the subject. It's still a very Chambers book, but somehow missing whatever gives me a frisson of delight every time I finish one.

Glad I read it, but unlike every other Chambers book I've read, I'll probably not reread it. 5 stars to the title however, love it and where it comes from, and that did elicit a shiver of pleasure!

Unlike the super-high-tech far future of her Wayfarers series, Chambers focuses on just the near-future of the human race. Seen from a team of exoplanet explorers surveying alien life, To Be Taught paints a future where governments fail in the mission to space but the human spirit leads ordinary people to crowdfund the mission instead. And when the interstellar mission outlasts human lifespans, government lifespans and even societal lifespans, Chambers leaves us with a deeply personal question, ask from both her perspective and that of the protagonist, chronologically ancient, barely human and too distant to ever return home: how much is space exploration worth?