A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy
Becky Chambers (2021, 2022)
"What do people need?” A curious robot seeks to answer this question by being the first of its kind in generations to interact with humans. Centuries before, humans and robots parted ways and technological trajectories following what is alluded to as some moment of both realizing that the latter had attained sentience and were thus inherently deserving of self-determination.
Becky Chambers’s Monk & Robot duology, A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, follows the mundane travels of Dex the Tea Monk and Splendid Speckled Mosscap as they wander around a rewilding Earth-stand-in moon named Panga. Along their buddy road trip, the protagonists interact with various groups of people and other animals and other things. Each interaction provides the characters and reader opportunities for reflection on how we differentiate concepts like agency/dependence, human/nonhuman, sustainability/waste. The civilized/wild cut is most visibly rendered, as humans are taught to stay in their designated areas and pathways and to not wander into or disturb nature. The conversations around these designations are juxtaposed by the dual human and robot protagonists, who are signified by pronouns “they” and “it”, respectively, revealing an in-universe awareness of the arbitrariness of binary thinking.
The books are often categorized as “solarpunk”, and if you are familiar at all with the designations “steampunk” or “cyberpunk”, then you can probably guess the general direction where stories of this genre are going to take you. Here, “solar” signifies an ecologically positivist worldview of smaller agrarian-adjacent communities based around shared culture and religion, a gesture towards veganism and animism, and a minimal reliance on mechanized and computer technology. In literature, “punk” can co-signify a techno-dystopian future, an alternate timeline that maintains Victorian aesthetic as the preferred dress and decor, or an optimistic spin on climate doomerism à la Station Eleven or that tear-jerker episode of Last of Us with Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett.
Without trapping myself in an argument of what is/n’t “real” and at the risk of saying distinctions don’t matter, the “punk” angle makes sense if one embraces the music’s anticapitalist and anti-institutional ethos over expected markers of dress and instrumentalization. Arguments for expanding the genre across music criticism platforms rarely win over adherents, but I’ve found pitches for the Pogues, They Might Be Giants, Public Enemy, and Los Tigres del Norte as punk convincing in their temporary utility and self-awareness. Green Day was punk, and then they weren’t enough, and then they were again, at least according to 924 Gilman.
Later in the story, Dex’s father asks Mosscap what robots need. Splendid Speckled Mosscap, echoing every human it had asked across the two books, doesn’t have an immediate answer and is even somewhat taken aback to be asked. This anticipated inversion of plot’s catalyst draws some attention to the subjective nature of consciousness, autonomy, and being, which the books graciously leave undisturbed.
