Dave's Blog

{5/5} “This had been the way of things since the Transition, when the people had redivided the surface of their moon. Fifty percent of Panga’s single continent was designated for human use; the rest was left to nature, and the ocean was barely touched at all. It was a crazy split, if you thought about it: half the land for a single species, half for the hundreds of thousands of others.”

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers, published in 2021

Sibling Dex is a monk who tends a garden in the City on Panga. After becoming obsessed with the ideas of listening to crickets, they decide to move out of the City and run a tea service. Although their start is inauspicious, they learn what they need to learn. They discovered that crickets were almost extinct on Panga. Eventually tea service isn’t enough and Dex heads into the protected wilderness zone where crickets might still be alive — of course, that’s also where the robots live.

This is a novella that answers the question: If humans and robots hadn’t interacted in 200 years, what would they talk about?

It’s a perfect gem of a story, and I look forward to the next one. It’s about friendship, and feeling like you need something different.

I’ve read 6 books by Chambers. I previously reviewed The Galaxy, and the Ground Within.