(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)
The age we live is in many ways not a happy one.
Beset by war, climate change, microbial resistance, the rise of fascistic government and a host of other ailments, people feel beleaguered and exhausted and pessimistic about whether there are any ready solutions to any of the prevailing issues at hand.
That sense of helplessness and slow-simmering doom for the present has found expression increasingly in recent years in dystopian and apocalyptic tales that see nothing but ruin and oblivion for humanity, our destiny one of scarcity, loss, violence and monsters, both human and otherwise.
Not cheery enough, not even a little bit but in the midst of all this doom and gloom, author Becky Chambers, serves up an optimistic antidote in A Psalm for the Wild Built (A Monk and Robot Book), which asks whether we might be able to meet all these oncoming trains of existential destruction with a positive response that has the potential to change everything?
It’s a daring gambit to throw up up positivism and progress when only pessimistic portents prevail, but it works, largely the world she offers up feels wholly and wonderful possible, and doesn’t trade simply in cosy “what if” notions that are unmoored from reality but grounds itself in the truth of a reality that could have easily gone cascading into chasm from which civilisation might never have recovered.
Despite these blessings, sometimes Dex could not sleep. In those hours, they frequently asked themself what it was they were doing. They never truly felt like they got a handle on that. They kept doing it all the same.
A Psalm for the Wild Built (A Monk and Robot Book) is set on the lush moon of Panga, a place which in its modern incarnation is a mix of technological advancement realised in harmony with respect for and preservation of the natural world, the result of a history turning event several centuries earlier known simply as the Awakening.
Triggered by the sudden and still unexplained gaining of self-awareness by the moon’s robotic workforce, the Awakening forced humanity to grapple with what would become of their industry and capitalistic excess when the very artificial beings that sustained it had just up and wandered off, en masse, into the dense wilderness of Panga.
This sudden shift in the economic certainties long taken for granted forced people to ask themselves whether they want to stay the course with heavy industry etc polluting the planet, with all the attendant climatic changes consequences it was engendering or whether they need to change tack and remake their world and society for the better.
Several centuries on from the great existential crossroads, there is only one City on the moon, surrounded by smaller satellite towns, all of whom operate on a mix of high tech and low impact living, a daring approach which has seen 50% of Panga surrendered back to dense forest which has wasted no time swallowing up the remnants of civilisation left behind.
The impressive thing about the Awakening is that people collectively decided to let the robots go in peace, and rather than forcing them to keep working in factories and other workplaces, let them go off and determine their own destinies without any interference from their creators.
(courtesy official author site)
In this bucolically idealistic world, people still struggle to define themselves and the parameters of the life that will make them happiest – the great thing about A Psalm for the Wild Built (A Monk and Robot Book) is that it doesn’t pretend the Awakening solved everything and that many of the issues that beset people once, beset them still, bringing needed authenticity to this uplifting tale – and so it is that a monk by the name of Sibling Dex decides they can no longer live in the City and that they need to reinvent themselves as a tea monk who are, for want of a better world, therapists who let people work out their issues over just the right brew.
Things are rocky at first, as any transition is bound to be, but then Dex finds their feet and becomes a fixture in many of the rural towns, their counsel and tea selections much valued by a populace who still need to deal with the vexing issues of being alive.
Their life is going swimmingly well until they realise the dissatisfaction that drove them to upend their life has still not been fully dealt with and that they need to make further radical steps to answer that gnawing sense of incompleteness, at which point they meet Mosscap, a robot who is on a quest to find out “What do people need?”
If that sounds like a big question, it is, and after centuries of separation between human and robots, Mosscap doesn’t realise how open-ended their quest will be, but Dex and Mosscap form a timid but later fulsome bond that not only begins to answer the biggest of all questions but which represents the first humans and robots have interacted in centuries.
Where could it all lead?
Everything about that statement made Dex question every life decision that had led them to this point. Grumbling, they pulled up their socks until they could feel the threads strain beneath their heels, then follow Mosscap into the woods.
To be fair, that isn’t answered fully in A Psalm for the Wild Built (A Monk and Robot Book) and nor could it possibly be but what we do get is an emotionally thoughtful, meaningfully whimsical and welcomingly optimistic look at what might happen if humanity came racing up to the brink of disaster, and rather than plunging blindly over, wondered what might happen if some transformative steps were taken elsewhere.
It’s illuminating and comforting and because it’s so grounded in the stark realities if day-to-day life and what it means to be alive, A Psalm for the Wild Built (A Monk and Robot Book) never once feels like some sort of warm-and fuzzy fairytale only good for mushy feelings and no actual hard action.
This superbly written novella takes all that pessimism and fear for the future that threatens to overwhelm us catastrophically and offers up healing optimism, the kind that doesn’t just muse that things could be better but which shows us how that might actually happen, not just in society as a whole, but the warming, happy new friendship between Dex and Mosscap.
Full to the brim with empathy, wit, connection and charming kindness and loveliness, A Psalm for the Wild Built (A Monk and Robot Book) is the sort of darkness banishing remedy we all need right now, because it doesn’t pretend that everything will be magically better but rather offers up a vision of the future which could actually happen if we don’t choose narcissistic self interest but rather open ourselves to new ideas and to others, human or robot, and find out where things might lead if we optimistically ask “What if?”
If the answer is anything as wonderful, buoyantly alive and soul-bolstering as A Psalm for the Wild Built (A Monk and Robot Book), then we can look forward to a very bright future indeed, one where humanity, its creations and nature all live in harmony and the talk is not of endings but beginnings, which, let’s face it, are the very best conversations to have, especially if they start between a highly likeable robot and a human and are sprinkled with as much kindness, empathy and curiosity as this novel has its gloriously wondrous spades.