Review: A Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers

[Russ Allbery]

A Psalm for the Wild-Built
by Becky Chambers

Series:    Monk & Robot #1
Publisher: Tordotcom
Copyright: July 2021
ISBN:      1-250-23622-3
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     160

At the start of the story, Sibling Dex is a monk in a monastery in
Panga's only City. They have spent their entire life there, love the
buildings, know the hidden corners of the parks, and find the
architecture beautiful. They're also heartily sick of it and desperate
for the sound of crickets.

  Sometimes, a person reaches a point in their life when it becomes
  absolutely essential to get the fuck out of the city.

Sibling Dex therefore decides to upend their life and travel the
outlying villages doing tea service. And they do. They commission an
ox-bike wagon, throw themselves into learning cultivation and herbs,
experiment with different teas, and practice. It's a lot to learn, and
they don't get it right from the start, but Sibling Dex is the sort of
person who puts in the work to do something well. Before long, they
have a new life as a traveling tea monk.

It's better than living in the City. But it still isn't enough.

We don't find out much about the moon of Panga in this story. Humans
live there and it has a human-friendly biosphere with recognizable
species, but it is clearly not Earth. The story does not reveal how
humans came to live there. Dex's civilization is quite advanced and
appears to be at least partly post-scarcity: people work and have
professions, but money is rarely mentioned, poverty doesn't appear to
be a problem, and Dex, despite being a monk with no obvious source of
income, is able to commission the construction of a wagon home without
any difficulty. They follow a religion that has no obvious Earth
analogue.

The most fascinating thing about Panga is an event in its history. It
previously had an economy based on robot factories, but the robots
became sentient. Since this is a Becky Chambers story, the humans
reaction was to ask the robots what they wanted to do and respect their
decision. The robots, not very happy about having their whole existence
limited to human design, decided to leave, walking off into the wild.
Humans respected their agreement, rebuilt their infrastructure without
using robots or artificial intelligence, and left the robots alone.
Nothing has been heard from them in centuries.

As you might expect, Sibling Dex meets a robot. Its name is Mosscap,
and it was selected to check in with humans. Their attempts to
understand each other is much of the story. The rest is Dex's attempt
to find what still seems to be missing from life, starting with an
attempt to reach a ruined monastery out in the wild.

As with Chambers's other books, A Psalm for the Wild-Built contains a
lot of earnest and well-meaning people having thoughtful conversations.
Unlike her other books, there is almost no plot apart from those
conversations of self-discovery and a profile of Sibling Dex as a
character. That plus the earnestness of two naturally introspective
characters who want to put their thoughts into words gave this story an
oddly didactic tone for me. There are moments that felt like the moral
of a Saturday morning cartoon show (I am probably dating myself),
although the morals are more sophisticated and conditional. Saying I
disliked the tone would be going too far, but it didn't flow as well
for me as Chambers's other novels.

I liked the handling of religion, and I loved Sibling Dex's efforts to
describe or act on an almost impossible to describe sense that their
life isn't quite what they want. There are some lovely bits of
description, including the abandoned monastery. The role of a tea monk
in this imagined society is a neat, if small, bit of world-building: a
bit like a counselor and a bit like a priest, but not truly like either
because of the different focus on acceptance, listening, and a hot cup
of tea. And Dex's interaction with Mosscap over offering and accepting
food is a beautiful bit of characterization.

That said, the story as a whole didn't entirely gel for me, partly
because of the didactic tone and partly because I didn't find Mosscap
or the described culture of the robots as interesting as I was hoping
that I would. But I'm still invested enough that I would read the
sequel.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built feels like a prelude or character
introduction more than a complete story. When we leave the characters,
they're just getting started. You know more about the robots (and
Sibling Dex) at the end than you did at the beginning, but don't expect
much in the way of resolution.

Followed by A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, scheduled for 2022.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2021-11-26

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-250-23622-3.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>