A Psalm for the Wild-Built

If your friends have not recommended A Psalm for the Wild-Built yet, I think it may be time to get some new ones. Written by sci-fi author Becky Chambers, Psalm is a 2022 Hugo Award winner, and the first book in the two-part “Monk and Robot” series. 

The physical book is tiny, totaling a digestible 147 pages in a whimsically illustrated jacket. I wouldn't fault you if you mistook it for a children's book from a brief glance at its cover, but there is a very famous saying about that type of behavior. 

 This is a book for everyone. 

Centuries before the events of this story, the robots that serve humanity suddenly and inexplicably gain self-awareness. Unlike every other work of speculative fiction, this development does not lead to a war or planet-wide conflict, or even a dramatic man vs. robot fist fight in a tempest drenched cityscape. 

Instead, humanity immediately acknowledges that such a workplace relationship is exploitative and morally bankrupt, and frees the robots from servitude. 

The robots choose to leave human society, opting to live in the wild so that they can witness a world without “human design.” 

This event causes humanity to undergo an era of self-reflection, and it arrives at the painful realization that mass scale manufacturing and industrial progress has done more harm than good. 

Society is then actually restructured to avoid further harm. 

People no longer leave the cities in order to protect the wild ecosystems from their presence. As a result, there has been no contact with the robots since their departure. That is, until a humble monk named Dex wanders into the woods, on a quiet search for answers of their own. 

Early on it is clear that Chambers could deliver a rich master class in fiction writing. Her world-building is expansive yet disciplined; readers learn the relevant rules of this bold society without ever having to power through long winded passages of bald exposition. 

Chambers’ diction and playful originality in both sentence structure and overall story-telling give the work a salient texture that is wholly its own. When she describes the architecture of a city, we feel like we’ve happily lived there for years - the walls may as well have been made with childhood memories. 

When she describes the experience of venturing into the wilds, we are reminded that grass has a smell, the world is alive, and no place is ever truly empty. 

Sibling Dex, the main character, is a tea monk. They travel to different human settlements, simply, and make hot tea for people suffering from a bad mood. 

The writing evokes a sense of coziness and almost striking positivity. You’ll crave a sip of tea as you turn the pages; I discovered myself under a blanket, near a candle with swirling scents of apples and cinnamon as I followed Dex into the woods. 

Seeking to soothe a vague sense of dissatisfaction, Sibling Dex crosses the wild border and meets Mosscap, a robot sent from the wild to investigate how humans are doing. 

Mossacp agrees to escort Dex deeper into the wilds, hoping that Dex will do the same for Mosscap in the human world. 

There is no true antagonistic element in Psalm, there is no violent conflict, no struggle against the system. Society is good. The status quo is good. Life is good. And yet, not good enough. 

Dex is deeply unhappy, and is looking for a purpose they don’t believe that their society can provide. Against the backdrop of a near-perfect society, this internal conflict within Dex is gut wrenching, because it raises uncomfortable questions: What if happiness isn't enough?

Solarpunk

Psalm is a recent addition to the genre known as solarpunk, an artistic movement that speculates how technological innovation can create an eco-friendly world. Or in other words, it imagines a future where humanity has its shit together.

You may be more familiar with solarpunk’s elder sister, cyberpunk.  Where solarpunk focuses on dreamy utopias, cyberpunk focuses on bleak dystopias. 

Arguably kicked off by Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep in 1968, the cyberpunk genre was finalized with Wiliam Gibson’s 1984 classic Neuromancer. The dark techno-futuristic aesthetic has remained largely unchanged and is easily recognizable by its rain-battered cityscapes, large and misshapen by rampant technological progress, and people disfigured by grotesque cybernetic enhancements. 

The rich live in God-defying corporate skyscrapers, and the poor live low to the ground. 

These settings intentionally portray deep economic stratification, where the poor are as we imagine them today, and only the elite reap the benefits of progress, forever widening the gap of wealth, power, and dignity. 

It’s no coincidence that cyberpunk really found itself during the Reagan era. The genre is a blunt critique on unfettered capitalism, just with more robots and leather outfits than one might expect. 

The genre moved into cinema as well, with direct influences in films such as Blade Runner, Robocop, and The Matrix, to name a few.The throughline within all cyberpunk is the desperate plea against a future defined by unchanged trends, the casual horror of a system that reduces our value to the barest economic utility, forcing us to literally become part of a corporate machine to survive. 

And in some ways, the genre remains today, though mostly as remakes and throwbacks (Bladerunner 2099, Matrix Resurrections, Robocop again - business decisions calculated to profit off of cultural nostalgia). 

If the once biting critique has lost its edge, it’s because the dystopian future that the cyberpunk movement spent a half century fighting is actually now upon us. The fiction of cyberpunk is after all an imagined world of wealth inequality, where power is defined by our access to technology, and where AI has more respect than a lot of people. Education, healthcare, and even dating are increasingly commodified by expanding digital realities. 

Perhaps this bleak new world has made solarpunk necessary. Where cyberpunk was a warning, solarpunk is focused on solutions. 

Solarpunk started in Brazilian sci-fi literature circa 2012 in a series of short stories, and quickly spawned a digital art movement. Images of futuristic eco-friendly cities proliferated across the internet, featuring human settlements reimagined as cooperating with nature rather than supplanting it. 

The art movement in turn inspired new literature using these artistic renditions as settings, telling stories and offering imaginations so far focused on the use of technology to repair our relationship with the environment. 

Decades from now though, when we look back, we may very well identify Psalm as the point where the genre truly coalesced its multiple themes of optimism to center on the idea that our humanity is inherently valuable and beautiful, and there is no reason society can’t be beautiful too. 

The story of Psalm serves as an affirmation, an argument to live and live fully. And yet, despite Chamber’s vision of optimism and hope, I think A Psalm for the Wild-Built can be as damning as any cyberpunk novel I’ve read so far. 

Chambers reimagines a world where we did everything right, and it is impossible not to remember the reality we do inhabit, the choices we make, the values we discard for convenience. She says “Look at what we could’ve been. Look.” 

Opinions expressed are solely the author’s own and do not reflect the views of their employer.