To Be Taught, If Fortunate

This didn't really grab me in the way I thought it would. The first third is quite slow, though it picks up a lot on the second and third planets explored. I love stories about space travel and found the time dilation interesting, though executed in a way I didn't expect.

Chambers explores the ethics of space travel, particularly a sort of reverse-Alien consideration - what do we bring to planets, and how may that impact them? (Of course, thinking about the examples throughout our history of colonization and infectious disease...) I liked that. I have some qualms with the closing pages that I'm going to write out in the following spoilered section...

There is a passage in the final third that made me sit the book down and go through some memories though. I write about that over on my SubStack here: https://tbindc.substack.com/p/home-space-travel-and-updates.

Okay - so there is a big focus on not impacting the local environment throughout the book. For most of the story, this as one of the prime directives of the crew makes sense. They seem quite happy to ignore it to escape from Opera as they fry up a few hundred leaching rats on the side of their ship in blasting off the planet's surface (in fact, our main character directly discusses it). They do this to carry on their mission and to survive.Yet, when they are faced with the potential of Earth's (or, humanity's) destruction and wonder what to do, they make some really weird decisions. Ariadne suggests they go to another planet, out of reach but likely to sustain life. Yet, the crew says if they do this - they will have to live on the ship, in orbit. This really baffled me - that's a high fidelity to their value of not impacting the environment!I hesitate to say it's not "realistic" because I don't exactly look for total fidelity to realism in science fiction. I do, however, find it a bit arrogant, and inconsistent with what they said previously in the book, where Ariadne mentioned that if just their presence impacted an evolutionary line, it wasn't that stable to begin with.Sure, their mere presence and their living a life on a planet are not the same thing. That said, 4 people living in an isolated camp is not exactly the stuff of tectonic evolutionary changes. Or, maybe it is. I'll noodle on it a bit more.That aside, I can say pretty firmly that I wouldn't surrender my agency to a distant and potentially destroyed planet. Sorry, folks!