Becky Chambers' Books Irk Me

(These thoughts were first published on tumblr)

I read three novellas by Becky Chambers this year, and experienced varying degrees of frustration with each of them. The Monk and Robot books were superficially serene and tinged with queerness, but beneath this facade, the world basked in utopian imaginations of the most vapid sort. No more conflict, save for those against nature and the self, and the condescending benevolence of humans allowing their robot slaves to take leave of their oppressors on discovering their enslavement. No struggle, only agreement, and endless forgiveness for the oppressors. And further down, beneath that, was a fish, left to die on land, gasping for breath, and this act of non-intervention, the refusal to kill a fish that would eventually be eaten was framed as kindness.

next was To Be Taught If Fortunate, which, frankly read like a long form advertisement for N.A.S.A., where a group of four interstellar astronauts, through their spokesperson, find it completely appropriate to emphasize the nobility of their work when addressing the potentially ravaged population of the earth. Science above all, the narrator condescends, in a transmission to what is left of the earth (and in practice, the reader), you might not be interested in this, or more accurately, you might understand nothing of what we do, but you must trust me when I say it is important, for I am a practitioner of The Sciences, and science is a privileged domain of knowledge that few have access to for reasons I, as an astronaut refuse to make clear to you, for,

[…] what if science isn't your world? I admit I don't know whether people outside of my social sphere would care about this at all. I've spent my entire adult life embedded with scientists and the people who love them. I take it for granted that this knowledge is cherished, is yearned for. And I am keenly aware that in order to tell you what we found, it required a thousand words of explanation before I could get to the crux. Is this discovery of ours too obtuse? Did you skim through the science in search of the point? I won't judge you if you did; I'm genuinely curious.

all this to tie-off the most pedestrian explanation of chirality and the narrative discovery of organisms that don't display chirality. I wonder if a biologist reading this book might have thrown it against a wall in frustration, for even as a layperson, I was considering the act, given the patronising tone.

and at the end of it I wonder, who are these books for, exactly? The monk and robot books were dedicated to “[…] anybody who could use a break.” and “[…] anybody who doesn't know where they're going” respectively. Following this, the author makes it clear that these readers should indulge in some eclectic form of new age religion, visit a therapist, go on journeys of self discovery to the “uninhabited lands” (you know, where the robots dwell) as the inhabitants of the moon Panga do, and continue with their lives in radical acceptance. And let me tell you, only a very specific kind of person can live like that on our home planet of Earth.

Now, I am well aware that many people reading these books look to them as a means of escape, but I am not one of them. I look to literature for reflections of the world I live in, however distorted they may be, and Becky Chambers' distortions are monstrous (derogatory; I am delineating her work from the joyful and laudatory monstrosities literature can produce) in a way that only an author from the United States of America could manage