Bryan Alexander's Reviews > A Psalm for the Wild-Built

A Psalm for the Wild-Built is a short science fiction novel - really a novella. Specifically, it is a blend of two subgenres, solarpunk and cozy sf.

It takes place on another world, populated by humans and robots. The plot concerns a monk who suddenly changes his vocation to become a hybrid tea-server/therapist, then how a friendly robot helps him deal with some personal issues.

First, I'll describe how the book develops the solarpunk concept. Then I'll turn to my criticisms.

Becky Chambers uses all kinds of solarpunk tropes: solar power, low human population, lots of biology intertwined with human life (biophilic design), DIY production, fabbing, 3d printing, and the received memory of a bad industrial past (before "the Transition" away from "The Factory Age"). E O Wilson's half Earth idea is realized, albeit not for Earth per se (18). There's a mystic religion with which the book begins, which seems to nudge believers away from industrialism. Here's a glimpse of this world:

...Dex road their ox-bike to the worm farm or the seed library or wherever else the day took them. There was music... but also the electric whoosh of monorails, the swoop swoop of balcony wind turbines... (6-7)

Later, Chambers posits a contrast between the old age and the new through comparative architecture:

[an old ruin:] Hulking towers of boxes, bolts, and tubes. Brutal. Utilitarian. Visually at odds with thr thriving flora now laying claim to the rusted corpse. But corpse was not an apt word for this sort of building, because a corpse was a rich treasure - a bounty of nutrients ready to be divided and reclaimed. The buildings Dex was most used to fit this description. Decay was a built-in function of the City's towers, crafted from translucent casain and mycelium masonry. Those walls would, in time, begin to decompose, at which point they'd either be repeared by materials grown for that express purpose, or, if the building was no longer in use, be reabsorbed into the landscape that had hosted it for a time. But a Factory Age building, a metal building - that was of no benefit to anything... Its only legacy was to persist where it did not belong. (90)

Further, this solarpunk world is very caring. Most of the jobs are service ones, aimed at serving other people directly or indirectly. People try to be nice to each other. There isn't any competition or domination.

Now for criticism.
I have to get this out of the way. Cozy science fiction just doesn't work for me. The story gives us plenty of cozy: lots of cushions, nice beds, comfortable chairs, cloth of all kinds, people being nice to each other, eating happy food, drinking lovely tea. And the dedication is an open invitation to relax and destress. Nobody works too hard or seems to suffer.

Why does this bug me so much? Right now I should need a dose of relaxation. I picked up this book when I was suffering from sustained overwork, the death of my father, and my wife enduring two (2!) heart attacks. Yet I keep finding myself asking inappropriate things of Chambers' story, and wanting it to be less damned *nice*.

I'm not sure if my allergy to nice powers my other criticisms, namely of the world and the main character's arc. For the former, the world is pleasant in a consuming way. We don't see a lot of making - Dex's amazing vehicle/house gets build off-stage. We don't learn how the new society evolved. Actually, I'd rather read about the people who made Panga's society, than these consumers of its success. I'm curious about how learning and information worked. There's something of an internet, albeit a slow one and accessed by old, long-maintained hardware. Dex learns their new job entirely by doing - does this society have mental health professional licensing? What about universities?

As to the latter... I didn't really get Dex. I lost sympathy with our tea monk as their life kept looking nicer and nicer, and they couldn't be bothered to Google or even ask people about the very thing they sought (crickets). Their crisis of... not faith, not midlife, but life? sjust didn't strike me as serious. In contrast, I wanted to know more about the people who ventured into the wild and never came back.

Perhaps this is an example of the very old problem of how to make a story work in utopia. Dystopias are great for narrative, but if everyone's happy, it's difficult to have the conflict stories need. There are solutions to this, like playing along the utopia's margins (cf Iain Banks' Culture series). Perhaps in later books Dex will rebel against the niceness. Or maybe that's my punk self hoping against hope.

It's weird how reviewers respond to the book. They often seem to find ideas here for the first time, like the half Earth concept, or the "people do what they want" jobs model from William Morris. People also view the book as fantasy, whereas it really looks like science fiction: alien world, robots, engineering problems, alien life.

There are some clear signs of contemporary progressive politics, as per the other Chambers I've read. Gender gets set aside completely, as we have a nonbinary protagonist and a machine who prefers to be called "it." I did run into one issue with this at a lexical level. During the book's second half "they" and "them" refer to either Dex or Dex and Mosscap together, and it's not always clear which one is in play. Another progressive sign is the focus on therapy. For the book's first half Dex does a light form of talk therapy for their tea customers, and in the second Mosscap does the same for Dex. These conversations are central to the book, especially carrying its emotional heft.

Summing up, this is a very useful example of solarpunk. As a story, I found it too cozy and light.