In keeping with the rest of Chambers’ work, Psalm is a remarkably personal story set within a much larger saga in this instance, she sets Sibling Dex’s journey across Panga against a canvas of rapid, large-scale sociocultural evolution. Rather, it is a story of discovery, fueled by the tension of exploring a small slice of an unknown world, like a more tightly constructed Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. So it is striking that Becky Chambers’ novella A Psalm for the Wild-Built is narratively compelling without anything approximating a typical science fiction conflict.

Typically, we assume that stories require conflict, and this is particularly true in genre fiction, in which there are worlds to be saved, aliens and elves to be romanced and new technologies and ancient incantations to be discovered. But after years tending to the villages, Dex’s cricketsong wanderlust remains unfulfilled, and they leave the trails between human habitations behind, striking off into the foreign forests. They decide to become a tea monk, a vocation devoted to helping people in the satellite villages through a combination of good listening and good tea.

The robots vanished into the wilderness, and the humans have lived in their cities alone ever since.Īfter Sibling Dex begins ruminating on a recording of evening crickets-a sound that they have never heard in reality, as generations ago, crickets were rendered extinct in areas inhabited by humans-they start to see all the other ways they feel unfulfilled. Dex is a monk of Allalae, the god of small comforts, living in the only city on the planet of Panga. Their city and its satellite villages are the only parts of their world where humans have lived since the Factory Age, which ended when human-built robots suddenly achieved consciousness and asked to be given the freedom to choose their own path through existence.

A psalm for the wild built reviews