A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

Dex has everything they could possibly need or want, but still, there seems to be something missing from their life.

However, Dex isn’t satisfied with their life as a garden monk, and their new vocation as a tea monk doesn’t seem to satisfy them either. This world, many years later, is the one in which we meet Sibling Dex, a monk of one of the Child Gods called Allalae featured in the religion humans on Panga follow. They could go and live as they wished, and humans would resolve to live in harmony with the environment.

Rather than enforce our will upon the newly sentient robots, we made a Promise with them. That is, until all the robots we built to work for us woke up. As humans will do, we built factories and roads and all the other environment-wrecking things we believe necessary for us to live. The story takes place on a colonized moon called Panga that orbits a gas giant planet called Motan. That being said, the Goodreads summary is a bit misleading, and it doesn’t match the summary inside the book cover. I just picked up A Psalm for the Wild-Built yesterday, and I flew through it.Ī Psalm for the Wild-Built is a short, interesting sci-fi novella with a non-binary main character and robots that somehow manages to be equal parts bucolic, snarky, thought-provoking, and introspective. Unfortunately, I didn’t get approved for an ARC of this novella, but my local library fulfilled my “Suggest a Purchase” request. This has been a busy year for me, and sometimes it’s nice to just read a short and sweet novella instead of binging an entire series. While I do plan to make time to read the Wayfarer’s series this year, I was even more excited to hear about her plans to start a new series of novellas. Her Wayfarer’s series won the 2019 Hugo Award for Best Series, and she has been on my radar for quite some time now. The robot cannot go back until the question of “what do people need?” is answered.īut the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how.īecky Chambers is an award-winning science fiction author. One day, the life of a tea monk is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in. It’s been centuries since the robots of Earth gained self-awareness and laid down their tools.Ĭenturies since they wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again.Ĭenturies since they faded into myth and urban legend. A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers