A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Monk & Robot #1) by Becky Chambers

If you are an astute reader of this here web log, you know that I ADORE the Wayfarers series from Becky Chambers. Go ahead and click that link and read my gushing reviews of those books. I actually asked for set of the physical books for my birthday last year and I rarely get hard copies of books these days. So, I'm pretty much going to read anything Becky Chambers writes and I'm going to do it gleefully. I have been on the waitlist for A Psalm for the Wild-Built for approximately (checks Libby app) about six months ago and just waited and waited.

Generations ago, Panga's robots developed self-awareness and wandered into the wilderness with no contact from humans. Humans continued to live their lives without robots. We start by meeting Sibling Dex, a monk who is dissatisfied with their life in the city. They want to hear crickets and see blue sky. So they embark to become a tea monk, flitting from village to village on their bicycle driven cart, providing comfort, advice, and peace to others. But they remains dissatisfied until one day they veer off their normal path and run into Splendid Speckled Mosscap, a robot who has been tasked with making the first contact with humans in living memory.  

What ensues is...

a very boring book. 

I'm sorry, Becky Chambers. I will definitely read the second book in this duology, but this was such a snooze. It just felt like a freshman philosophy lecture about the purpose of humanity and what existence is really about and I was not here for it. 

I liked the worldbuilding. I liked Dex and Mosscap. I loved what Dex saw when he was cycling around. I liked hearing about how the robots lived and governed themselves. I liked so much of this, but I constantly found myself falling asleep and having to flip back pages to reread what I had missed. I really love how Chambers makes science fiction that deals with serious topics so optimistic. I'm still fangirling, I promise. 

So.  Huh. I feel like I should apologize to Becky Chambers. I'm sorry, it's me, not you. Maybe I'll revisit this book at a different place in my life and love it. But for now, here's your perfectly average rating.

3/5 stars

Lines of note:

Nobody in the world knows where I am right now, they thought, and the notion of that filled them with bubbling excitement. (location 555)

It's been so long since I've had that feeling. It sounds very nice. (Man, to be a young 20something again. It was lonely at times, but also very free.)

"Whereas I ... I like everything. Everything is interesting. I know about a lot of things, but only a little in each regard." Mosscap's posture changed at this. They hunched a bit, lowered their gaze. "It's not a very studious way to be." (location 938)

This is how I feel in life. I am an expert on nothing, but I know a little about a lot and it's sort of embarrassing. Everyone else has an expertise, and other than Taskmaster and the care and feeding of Hannah the Dog, I really am a dilettante. It is embarrassing, particularly when your social circle is mostly academics who are just so passionate about what they do. 

It is difficult for anyone born and raised in human infrastructure to truly internalize the fact that your view of the world is backward. Even if you fully know that you live in a natural world that existed before you and will continue long after, even if you know that the wilderness is the default state of things, and that nature is not something that only happens in carefully curated enclaves between towns, something that pops up in empty spaces if you ignore them for a while, even if you spend your whole life believing yourself to be deeply in touch with the ebb and flow, the cycle, the ecosystem as it actually is, you will still have trouble picture an untouched world. You will still struggle to understand that human constructs are carved out and overlaid, that these are the places that are the in-between, not the other way around. (location 1343)

I can't remember where I heard/read this little anecdote, but there's a story about how when the Lewis and Clark expedition made its way across what is now the United States, they were shocked. It was as if someone had cleared a path for them. There would be thigh high prairie grasses and thickets of forest, but somehow, there was always a way for them to get through it. Of course there were, since indigenous people of North America had cleared it. 

I sometimes try to picture in my head what the Wisconsin prairie looked like before settlers came. What did the native grassland look like? How many birds flocked in the sky? Were there huge flocks of deer everywhere? What was the insect situation like? It's literally impossible for me to imagine because I am a human who was born and raised with human infrastructure as the very basic core of my life.