When Dex meets a robot for the first time, they struggle with how to treat it (is it an “it”?) and they must wrestle with their discomfort about human’s mistreatment of robots in factories many years ago. In this short work, Chambers raises a number of interesting issues about identity, equality, friendship, and purpose. A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

When they looked up at the skyscrapers, they no longer marveled at their height but despaired at their density – endless stacks of humanity, packed in so close that the vines that covered their engineered casein frames could lock tendrils with each other… Dex wanted to inhabit a place that spread not up but out. They (Dex is nonbinary) have an urge to hear the sound of crickets. Sibling Dex is a monk who follows Allallae, the God of Small Comforts. Dex decides one day to leave the monastery to go into tea service, which means driving from village to village in a wagon, setting out tea, and listening to people’s worries. Chambers explains there are two parent gods and a number of child gods. The opening neatly explains the history of robot independence while also cataloguing the different gods that are now worshipped, through a debate between whether robot conciousness is due to Chal, the God of Constructs, or Bosh, the God of the Cycle, or Samafar, the God of Mysteries. At some point it was decided that humans could occupy only half the planet, and the rest had to be left to the wild. There has been no human/robot interaction since, and humans now live a much simpler, technology-free life. Psalm is set in a future where robots have established sentience and separated from human beings. As a novella, there wasn’t as much content as I would have liked, but I’m looking forward to reading more. Psalm is a novella and the start of a science fiction series about man and robot. I wasn’t initially a fan of Chambers, but after Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, I’ve come to like each of her books more and more.

A psalm for the wild built reviews