A PSALM FOR THE WILD-BUILT by Becky Chambers
A PSALM FOR THE WILD-BUILT by Becky Chambers
Dex is a tea monk, travelling from town to town, listening to people’s sob stories, and offering them a tailored cup of tea to lift their spirits. But even a tea monk, committed as they are to restoring inner peace, has a limit. And Dex has well and truly reached theirs. After leaving a town on their regular circuit, Dex makes a break for it and heads into the wilds. There they meet Mosscap, a sentient robot keen on learning what it means to be human.
Without a hint of saccharine or treacle, what follows is a genuinely sweet philosophical-tract-as-buddy-roadtrip story in which Becky Chambers demonstrates, once again, why she is one of the best sci-fi writers at work today. It’s a genre well-suited to philosophical inquiry, and her engagements with existential questions of sentience, purpose, will and the importance of legacy often reminded me of a more Buddhist Stanislaw Lem. And if that isn’t the highest praise I could give, I don’t know what is.
A Psalm For the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers
Tor, 2021
160 pages
Becky Chambers writes in that sub-genre of SF&F that has come to be known as "hopepunk" - a terrible word in my view - that is the literal opposite of the "grimdark" subgenre and aims to depict people in positive, life-affirming situations. That's fair enough, though I sometimes think she forgets that fiction is also a form of drama, which impies that something dramatic usually occurs. Her first novel, A LONG WAY TO A SMALL ANGRY PLANET (great title), mixed the two reasonably well, though I don't think she found the right subject matter until this novella. It's certainly the best of her work since that first novel. There was a second novella in this series published in 2022, another that I am yet to get to. And, I assume, more will follow.