A Psalm for the Wild-Built/Becky Chambers

 Review: A Psalm for the Wild-Built, Becky Chambers (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2021)

This book is interesting for its positioning as well as for its content. Coming out in 2021, it fit the lingering vibe of COVID isolation well. Who couldn’t use a thin work of speculative fiction about an alternative, post-industrial world? Once I started traveling again I had mixed experiences with the book. I couldn’t get lost in its storyline, which is less quest than day-hike. And its bulk is so slight that I left my first copy in an airplane seat pocket. This is a work meant to be gobbled down over one or two coffees, not savored over multiple chapters. Moby Dick it’s not.

That said, Psalm is a meticulously crafted book. Chambers’ prose style has more beauty than power, but that works too. Her protagonist is a roving monk, a Sibling, who travels around the joyfully underpopulated countryside of Pnaga making tea and giving advice to anyone who needs it. Living in the post-industrial, post-apocalypse period of human history, humanity has finally learned humility and adopted lifestyles that blend seamlessly with the natural environment. There’s no state, no policemen or other authority figures beyond each town’s functionaries—a water engineer here, a council member there. This is no tale of empires and revolutions.

Instead Chamber spends most of the story describing the growing friendship between the monk Dex and a robot, Mosscap. In this age robots and humans live separate existences—the machine consciousnesses experienced an Awakening in which they collectively decided to disengage from humans and their fraught relationship between the two. Psalm is in effect an optimistic hope that humans and conscious machines can become equals on the plane of morality. At this point, wth the Singularity approaching fast, that’s idealistic.

The book is clearly also a critique of contemporary culture, all of our striving, our materialism, our inattention to relationships. It harbors hefty doses of west-Coast liberalism. I consistently stumbled whenever the author referred to Dex as “them” and “they.” That may just be me. (Didn’t have trouble with The Left Hand of Darkness, though.) But overall the book is a solid opening into a new world that aches to be sketched in more detail. Hopefully there will be more adventures in Panga.