A Psalm for the Wild-Built

 A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers, 160 pages.

(Opening Note: I love this cover)

This novella follows Sibling Dex, a devotee of the goddess of small comforts and tea monk who goes from village to village giving a listening ear, a place to rest, and a specially brewed cup of tea to anyone who needs it. However, Dex is feeling trapped and unhappy with their life, even as they believe they are doing good and worthwhile work. The same feeling that drove them from being a garden monk in the city to a tea monk in the first place.

On a whim they decide to go off the map into part of the 50% of the planet that is nature reserve, hoping to find crickets. What they find instead is Mosscap, a wild-built robot who was sent to be the first contact between robots and humans in centuries. They have been sent to check in on the world they left behind so long ago and ask the new question "what do people need?" 

The rest of the novella essentially sets out to explore that question. Strangely, this book and the last book I reviewed (Project Hail Mary, here) pretty much reversed my expectation of them. I expected Project Hail Mary to be interesting mostly for its world building and found instead that it was driven by emotionally rich explorations of personhood and interspecies contact. A Psalm for the Wild-Built which (with the presence of a tea monk as a concept) I expected to be carried by emotionally rich explorations of personhood and interspecies contact was instead primarily carried by the really phenomenal Solarpunk world building. The setting Chambers builds is extremely beautiful in a very hopeful way. It provides a really interesting meditation on the ways that people could live, if we all chose to, in a thousand little details. Definitely an interesting little book. If you want to here more about it, see Kara's post here.