14/365: A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

A Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers Rating: ★★★★ Series: Monk and Robot #1 Publication Date: July 3, 2021 Genre: sci fi Pages: 151 ReRead?: No Project: Project 365 Centuries before, robots of Panga gained self-awareness, laid down their tools, wandered, en masse into the wilderness, never to be seen again. They faded into myth and urban legend. Now the life of the tea monk who tells this story is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until the question of "what do people need?" is answered. But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how. They will need to ask it a lot. Chambers' series asks: in a world where people have what they want, does having more matter?

As I have probably already mentioned, I really enjoyed the Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers. These are a series of loosely connected science fiction novels starting with A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, published in 2014. I read the whole 4 book series last year.

Chambers writes what I would probably call semi-cozy sci fi, and which some readers call boring. I would love to find more sci fi that has a similar vibe, though – character driven, small scale, relatively low stakes adventures. There are no galaxy-wide wars here, no power crazed maniacs blowing up solar systems.

After I finished Wayfarers, I checked what else she had written and I found only the 2 novellas in the Monk & Robot duology: A Psalm for the Wild-Built & A Prayer for the Crown Shy.

I really enjoyed this novella, which is sweet and heartwarming. It starts with the premise that, on Panga many centuries ago, the robots gained sentience and instead of enslaving them, the people of Panga released them from servitude and watched as they wandered into the wilderness. Sibling Dex, a monk, has a parallel experience when he becomes dissatisfied with his life and decides to become an itinerant tea monk, circuiting the villages with his foot powered tea wagon, dispensing tea and a listening ear. The precipitating event of Dex’s disillusionment is his desire to find, and hear, crickets calling. On his journey, he meets Mosscap, the first robot that a human on Panga has encountered for several hundred years. Mosscap is on a quest of his own.

This is a very quiet book about a pleasant utopia. It’s almost an article of truth that every utopia is a dystopia in disguise but here, really, Panga is a utopia. Which means that it is, at best, implausible and, at worst, impossible. The idea that human beings would allow sentient robots the agency to choose a life for themselves that doesn’t include laboring in factories on behalf of the humans is, sadly, laughable. We don’t even allow our fellow humans that agency, after all. But, it is nice to envision a world where human beings are their best and most generous (collective) selves instead of, inevitably, the worst and most oppressively selfish version of ourselves.