“You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live. That is all most animals do.”
A Psalm for the Wild-Built
Written by Becky Chambers
It’s a monk and robot book. That’s what the cover says, and it’s fairly accurate. Sibling Dex is working as a tea monk when a buzzing idea in his head suddenly takes hold, and he makes the decision to stop everything... and journey to find crickets.
The continent of Panga is divided in two, the humans’ domain and that of unstructured nature. The humans made this decision centuries ago when they realized that by existing, they were causing harm, so they created these boundaries and found a way to live peacefully. They have plants and animals of course, but now crickets can only be found in the northern most edge of their domain. Sibling Dex has loved ones, a fulfilling job that they excel at, and an easy life, but now the urge to hear cricket’s chirping overrides it all.
It’s a hard journey that becomes even more strange when sibling Dex is greeted by a robot. Two hundred years ago after the robots gained sentience they departed to live in the protected natural areas of Panga. Upon leaving they made a promise to one day check in on humankind. During that time humanity learned to live without robotics, but now a friendly robot named Splendid Speckled Mosscap—Mosscap for short—is here to uphold that promise and ask “what do people need?”.
Sibling Dex and Mosscap find a way to combine their missions, and in doing so this book dips into the philosophical to discuss purpose. It’s a quaint, slow read, but by the end, I had sunk in, utterly charmed by Mosscap and felt a kinship to Sibling Dex. I felt like I understood Sibling Dex’s mission more than they did. The importance of crickets. Ironically while reading this, my workplace had a small cricket plague and I could hear crickets at all times, but that’s beside the point. This book felt like meditation. It may be a science fiction, but if you enjoyed Becky Chamber’s Wayfairer series, you should know her Monk and Robot books are stylistically different. Where Wayfarer books contemplate intelligent life existing together, the Monk and Robot books are about simplicity and connecting with nature and gods.
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