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
Well, I've now read the second novella in this sequence and the early promise of the first has faded into nothing. This reads like the second quarter of a longer novel as we watch the monk and the robot walk from one place to another, seeing lovely places, meeting lovely people, and generally having a lovely time. "Never is heard a discouraging word", nor one in anger or argument. Totally tame, and flat.
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.