A Psalm for the Wild-Built & A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers, published in 2021 & 2022.
I just finished the Duology of the Monk and Robot series. Such a wonderful and playful story. A great read, and I eagerly jumped from book 1 to book 2.
How Solarpunk is presenting a happy apocalypse.
With all the negative news out there, I love reading a book that insinuates that human beings aren’t about to die off. If we put our heads and hands together, we may find a way forward as a people. Wow! Dive into solarpunk … I recommend it!
There were two things in the book that intrigued me.
First: Many, many years ago the Robots gained sentience — and when they did they asked Humanity for the right to leave their indentured servitude. To be free. And the humans decided as a whole to allow it. Or not to fight it anyway. Around the same time, humans pulled back from inhabiting the entire world and allowed vast tracts of wilderness to exist.
To be fair, things must have gone so horribly wrong in an environmental and unrestrained-capitalism kind of way that maybe the people didn’t really have that much of a choice. But still. They did choose it.
Second: The idea of place. What about the place? In A Psalm for the Wild-Built the place is the ROAD. The road in the wilderness and journeying outward. The place is also the road in A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, but it is the road connecting human settlements. In a lovely way, the path of the story mirrors those roads. Journeying away, Coming home.
Now on to a criticism. Or at least a twang or dissonance that I felt was there: I saw a fundamental inconsistency between the values of the world of the story and the values and behavior of Monk.
In the world, people have become happy with having less… so as to leave space for animals and nature to exist. And the robots are like the Hermits of that world, reveling in the beauty of the natural world. Notice the artwork from the book cover mirrors these ideas.
However in the storyline, Monk develops a single-minded obsession with going. Going first from village to village. Then leaving human places all together. I am reminded of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and the relentless fleeing, either from or toward, that took over that Beat poet. My own father followed that same siren’s call. The heroic archetype written in our subconscious: only by journeying far away and facing a distant challenge can we find ourselves. Or grow up. How did people ever grow up before we had planes, trains and automobiles?
These books were published in 2021 and 2022, so it’s almost like you can see the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown is the invisible element in the psyche of the author. I am not sure if these stories were written during shutdown or not, but I wonder. Or maybe it’s more elemental than that: the urge to spread and colonize the world and expand that pretty much defines whether a species will be successful. And how being too successful can be a bad thing.
~Lizzy Loechel
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