Book Club Edition: “To Be Taught, If Fortunate” with Becky Chambers

**Mat Kaplan** (0:03)
To be taught, if fortunate. This time on Planetary Radio, Book Club Edition.
Welcome to our monthly visit with authors and creators who share their passion for space science and exploration, and who sometimes do so through superb fiction. I'm Matt Kaplan, Senior Communications Advisor for the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across the solar system and beyond. This time, well beyond. Back in April, our featured book was a delightful novella by Becky Chambers. That title to be taught if fortunate? Becky pulled it from the Voyager Golden Record, the message to the stars assembled by Andrion, Carl Sagan and others, that is now nearly one light day from Earth. The words were spoken by then UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim. His greeting to whomever might find the recording said, In part, we step out of our solar system into the universe, seeking only peace and friendship, to teach if we are called upon, to be taught if we are fortunate. We know full well that our planet and all its inhabitants are but a small part of this immense universe that surrounds us, and it is with humility and hope that we take this step.
And that, dear listeners, could be the theme of Becky's story. As you will hear, she calls it A Love Letter to Space Exploration. Critics and readers have called her work brilliant and have celebrated it with many awards. Becky joined me on May 5th in the Planetary Society's online member community for the conversation you are about to hear. I hope it will leave you feeling as hopeful and inspired as it did me.
Here is our special guest, Becky Chambers. Becky, thank you so much for joining us this evening in the Book Club.

**Becky Chambers** (2:11)
Thank you so much for the warm welcome. I'm very happy to be here.

**Mat Kaplan** (2:15)
All right. So let me tell people just a little bit more about you. Becky is a Locus and two-time HUO award-winning author of science fiction. She's probably best known as the author of The Wayfarer's Books.
Those were also nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Women's Prize for Fiction. You told me one the Hugo Prize for Best Series as well, which is.

**Becky Chambers** (2:40)
That's correct.

**Mat Kaplan** (2:40)
Congratulations. She is a Californian, so she's in the same time zone, fortunately. As we said, to be taught, if fortunate, has been around since 2019
Becky, you have many wonderful lines, passages in the book. One of them almost right up front is this, We're scientists. We live and breathe. Why?
Which I think sums up most of the people who call them some scientists that I've ever talked with. And aren't you the daughter of, if not a scientist, a big fan of science?

**Becky Chambers** (3:16)
Yeah, I am. I am the artsy black sheep of the family. I come from, yeah, I come from a family very heavily involved in space science. My parents are both retired now, but my dad was an aerospace engineer and my mother was an astrobiology educator. And my grandfather was a mathematician. He was contracted by NASA during the Apollo program. So yeah, space is something that my family does. And as a kid growing up, I never really questioned it. That's just what everyone's family does.
I couldn't help but absorb that growing up, even though I went in a more creative direction. I mean, it was impossible to not grow up with those influences around me and not fall in love with space and the scientific process itself.

**Mat Kaplan** (4:07)
Yeah, it's a pretty nice lineage. And you certainly, I think, have made your contributions. I mean, you talk in the notes at the end of the book, some of that taken excerpts from a conversation you had with your mom at a recent Worldcon Science Fiction Convention about the give and take between science and science fiction, which you're certainly very aware of.

**Becky Chambers** (4:30)
There has always been, at least as far as the, you know, as long as the two fields have existed side by side, there's such a beautiful symbiosis between real science and the stories we tell either about science or flavored by science, because of course, not all science fiction is intended to be, you know, an exact one to one dose of realism. But all science fiction, regardless of where it falls on the spectrum of believability is inspired by the real thing and pulls from that. And so I love seeing that back and forth, that give and take, seeing what we build off of each other.
It is a really beautiful thing.

**Mat Kaplan** (5:11)