A Psalm for the Wild-Built (2021) by Becky Chambers

Book Review

A Psalm for the Wild-Built (2021)

by Becky Chambers

   Although A Psalm for the Well-Built (2021) is strictly a work of genre science-fiction,  it has a couple of characteristics that seemed interesting enough to warrant a listen to the Audiobook.  First, A Psalm for the Well-Built is an example of the newly coined "Solarpunk" genre of science fiction.  The term was coined in opposition to cyberpunk, which typically features dystopian, tech heavy scenarios.  Solarpunk, on the other hand, is set in futures where humans have solved/escaped today's contemporary problems through the use of innovative, non-earth destroying technology or risen from the ashes of the destruction of a society more like our own and learned the appropriate lessons about not destroying the planet.

   The question given such a scenario is how does a writer generate the kind of conflict necessary to engage a reader, surely the reason that dystopian futures have proved so pervasive in science fiction is that the necessary conflict exists before the writer even pens a word.  The other interesting characteristic is that this is the first book I can remember reading where the third person omniscient narrator uses the singular they to refer to a protagonist who does not possess a named gender.  The stroy of A Psalm for the Well Built has nothing to do with gender: It's about the relationship that develops between a human "tea monk" and a "wild built" robot, robots have escaped human enslavement in the distant past within this particular future universe.

   As for conflict, there isn't much- but perhaps that is because this is only the first chapter in a proposed series of titles about this world.