A Psalm for the Wild-Built

Genre

Science Fiction & Speculative Fiction

Publisher

Tordotcom (Macmillan)

Publication year

2021

ISBN

9781250236210

On a moon where robots gained self-awareness centuries ago and withdrew into the wilderness, a restless tea monk meets the first robot to return, which has come to ask what humans need. Their gentle journey and conversation form Becky Chambers's novella, the first Monk and Robot book. It won the...

Centuries ago, on the moon of Panga, the world's robots woke to consciousness and quietly walked away into the wilderness, leaving humans to build a gentler, post-industrial society. Becky Chambers's Hugo-winning novella opens as a wandering 'tea monk,' who travels offering comfort and conversation, encounters the first robot to come back - a creature with a single disarming question: what do people need? What follows is less a plot than a walk and a dialogue, a warm, searching exchange about purpose, contentment and how to live without a productive reason to exist. This is comfort reading with a philosophical spine, the flagship of the 'solarpunk' and 'hopepunk' movements, offering an optimistic vision of coexistence with technology and nature that feels quietly radical in an anxious age. Chambers writes with unhurried tenderness, and at novella length the book asks little and gives much. For readers craving science fiction that is kind, thoughtful and restorative rather than grim, it is a small, sustaining pleasure - a balm in book form.