I found “A Psalm for the Wild-Built” following my recent hyperfixation with the solarpunk aesthetic. Solarpunk can best be described as a modern utopia where people live interconnected with nature and practice sustainable farming and energy harvesting. It’s the polar opposite of the cyberpunk aesthetic. In cyberpunk, the dystopian cities are made up of neon lights, crime, megalophobia-inducing brutalist buildings and nighttime. Most importantly, capitalism has infested every corner of the not-so-distant future. Think “Blade Runner” or “I, Robot.”
In solarpunk, it’s always daytime, humans respect their balance with nature, renewable energy is the standard and socioeconomic problems such as poverty and food scarcity have been eradicated thanks to individuals providing for themselves using the earth’s resources, i.e., capitalism is non-existent. It’s unfortunate, then, that the best representation of a solarpunk future we have in the media is from a yogurt commercial. Albeit a very good yogurt commercial.
Because of this, I thought I might find a better solution to my hyperfixation in literature, which is how I came across this book written by Becky Chambers.
“A Psalm for the Wild-Built” starts off with the protagonist, a non-binary monk who goes by the name ‘Sibling Dex.’ Growing tired of their profession, Dex wants to become a tea monk — someone who visits different villages to provide struggling people with the comfort of tea. It sounds odd at first, but in Chambers’ utopia, most people’s struggles can be fixed by a small cup of tea. And for Dex, a monk serving under Allalae, the god of small comforts, it makes sense why tea would be their profession.
The book starts to pick up when Dex begins searching for a deeper purpose in life, and no amount of tea or small comforts can answer their burning questions. They decide to go to The Hermitage, a part of the world ruled out of bounds for humans since The Awakening, the time when machines gained consciousness and decided to separate themselves from humans. And being a fictitious utopian society, humans were okay with machines having autonomy over themselves. Hundreds of years have passed since a human and robot came face-to-face with each other when Dex comes across the robot Mosscap.
From here on out, the book explores what it means to be human and how robot-kind and humankind are not so different from each other. Through the charming conversations held between both main characters, “A Psalm for the Wild-Built” explores the concepts of identity, human nature and the world’s desire to always be out of balance (that one really threw me for a loop).
I found myself entertaining these concepts in instances where I would otherwise brush them off. I’m not the type of person who spends a lot of time thinking deeply about why humans are the way that they are, but this book made exploring these topics approachable.
Part of the reason is that both Sibling Dex and Mosscap resemble intrinsic versions of ourselves, and make following these conversations relatable and deeply entertaining. Dex, who is a human tired of everyday life, represents ourselves when the monotonous routine of day-to-day life can make us forget the beauty of just being alive. Mosscap, a robot who has never spoken to a human, represents our inner child and how life was once something so grand and exciting — when we were still curious about everything around us and asked a million questions.
Despite these larger-than-life conversations, the book is like a warm cup of tea straight from the protagonist’s shop. The stakes are never greater than what the characters themselves invite, and even when problems do arise, they never last long enough to make you lose that sense of comfort that is presented throughout the book. It’s fitting for a book told through the perspective of a monk who worships a god of small comforts.