A PSALM FOR THE WILD-BUILT [MONK & ROBOT BOOK 1] | Becky Chambers

 

PUBLISHING DATE: 13 July 2021

This book is a delight. It is a triumph. If you are looking for something strange and comforting, wild and human, I urge you to get a copy of A Psalm for the Wild-Built and curl up for a few hours of reading. If you’re not, you should read it anyway.

Imagine, in a world where everything is done by robots, that one day the robots say, “we don’t want to do this anymore,” and disappear en masse into the wilderness, never to be seen or heard from again. That is the world of Panga, where half of the moon is dedicated to human civilisation, and the other half is untouched wilds. Here, Sibling Dex is a tea monk, and they spend their days cycling around the outskirts of cities, offering tea and comfort to those who need a listening ear. They are content with their life, until they aren’t. And into that mess of confusion comes Splendid Speckled Mosscap, a robot who wants to know the answer to one simple question: what is it that humans need?

Having read and loved the Wayfarers series, I am already a fan of Becky Chambers’ work. A Psalm for the Wild-Built is easily my favourite of everything she has written so far. This book is not long – at about 160 pages, it’s actually a novella, but even in that short a book, it is a beautiful, poignant exploration of what it means to be human, and what it means to truly, genuinely, have your existence be a blip in the wide, vast universe. I actually cried - not because it’s a sad book, but because I found it so deeply, deeply comforting and hopeful. Maybe I’m just having a day, but this book affected me much more than I was expecting, in the best way.

I am already eagerly looking forward to the next Monk & Robot book. I have every confidence that the following books will be just as magnificent as the first instalment.

Thank you to NetGalley and to Tor/Forge publishers for providing me with this ARC.