What would you get if an algorithm programmed to curate lo-fi chillhop playlists fell in love with a commercial printer, and together they decided to make a descendent? Something like Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built.
This novel follows tea monk Sibling Dex on a pedal-powered journey through a solarpunk utopia. Once, brewing custom-made teas and holding therapeutic space for the sustainable farmers and green technologists of Panga gave Dex a sense of purpose. Two years into their chosen vocation, however, the tea ceremony has begun to feel empty—and they find themselves longing for something they can’t even define.
When a (literal) fork in the road offers them a break from their routine, they ride their self-contained mobile home into the wilderness—and come face-to-face with Splendid Speckled Mosscap, the first robot any human has encountered since the end of the Factory Age. Together they cook chicken, hike backwoods trails, and philosophize, all while trying to figure out what exactly Dex is missing.
The best thing about this novel—and the hardest to buy into—is its setting: an ecologically stable world, and the sustainable, post-capitalist human society that thrives within it. Panga feels like a pillow shot in a Miyazaki film—lush, harmonious, and calming. On their ox-bike, Dex pedals through settlements where human technology integrates seamlessly with the natural world, rather than exploiting it.
The people they serve have their problems—squabbles, losses, muckmite nests in the town drainage system—but they live in a world which, unlike our own, feels fundamentally fine. On Panga, things are basically okay for most people, most of the time—a state of affairs which sounds utterly fantastical in a time of wealth inequality, a global pandemic, and the threat of nuclear war. Mosscap—a sentient robot with the ability to experience pride in a well-caramelized pan of onions—feels almost inevitable by comparison.
Chambers spends little time explaining Panga’s transition from Factory Age to post-capitalist utopia. Dex and Mosscap refer occasionally to the Parting Promise—humanity’s agreement to let newly sentient robots leave the factories where they’d been employed and develop their own society in the wilderness. The idea of people under capitalism making and keeping such a promise is a wild one—at least from the point of view of capitalist realism.
Chambers asks readers to make a leap of faith—and rewards that faith with one of the most delightful science fiction stories I’ve read in a long time.
Who doesn’t love a good robot? Mosscap has all the endearing curiosity of an Iron Giant or a WALL-E, plus the ability to debate about personhood and the nature of consciousness. With its fascination with bugs and the purposes of butter, Mosscap offers the perfect counterpoint to Dex, who is so distracted by the question of their life’s purpose that they are no longer satisfied by the bounty of simple pleasures freely available on Panga.
As they ask Mosscap, and by extension the reader: “What is wrong with me that I can have everything I could ever want and have ever asked for and still wake up in the morning feeling like every day is a slog?”
In Dex and Mosscap’s search for meaning—or something more fundamental than meaning—Chambers offers a wonderful example of a plot that doesn’t rely on the end of the world or the threat of violence to build and maintain momentum. Dex is never in much physical danger, particularly with Mosscap around to cushion any falls. But their quest to figure out “What is wrong” with them is riveting. Throughout this tragically short book (with only 147 pages to chew on, I’m hungry for the sequel), their search for an abandoned hermitage feels like the most important event in the world.
While readers looking for a detailed political analysis of Panga may be disappointed, this novel is a godsend to anyone needing a short break from the crazy times we live in. Like Dex offering a warm cup of tea and a listening ear, Chambers’ writing wraps the reader in a soothing, hopeful story of a world where people are free to pursue meaning—one forgotten road at a time.