Review: Monk and Robot

[jducoeur]

Just finished A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, a pair of novellas by Becky Chambers (author of the Wayfarers series) that effectively form a novel.

On the one hand, it's even more of a plot-free travelogue than The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. The story can be summarized as "Monk gets restless and heads into the woods. Monk meets Robot. Monk and Robot wind up on a long road trip."

But's also a profoundly beautiful, quiet story, about meaning and purpose and whether it even matters to have such things, or whether it's enough to just be.

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Like all of Chambers' work, the story is notionally science-fiction, taking place on what is clearly a human colony world (a moon of a gas giant) in the fairly-distant future. But also like all of her work, the SF aspect is fairly irrelevant. This isn't about spaceships or battles with aliens; it's about exploring different ways of being. To no small degree, it's about positing a quieter, healthier way to arrange human society.

The story starts a couple hundred years after The Factory Age, which came to an end when the robots revealed that they'd become sentient somewhere along the line, and would like to opt out of the labors to which they had been put. Humanity apparently reacted to this with a questionably-plausible but refreshingly-sensible agreeableness, so the humans and robots agreed to split the world between them, and the humans would leave the robots in peace until the robots chose otherwise. In the wake of that, the humans realized that their society was built on sand, and needed a serious rethink.

Our first protagonist (and viewpoint character) is Sibling Dex, a Tea Monk who travels from village to village, serving tea to anyone who wants and listening to their troubles. Having found a streak of dissatisfaction in their own life, they impulsively strike out into the Wilderness, to go in search of a monastery that no one has visited in many years. (And get away from people for a while: Dex is a pretty serious introvert in a pretty people-oriented role.)

They are making their way along, when a robot comes up and greets them, the first contact in centuries, to ask the apparently-simple question, "What do you need?" The quest to wrestle with answers to that is one of the main axes on which the rest of the story turns.

The robot is Mosscap, and it is wonderfully not what you expect. It is both deeply naive about how the human world works, but insightful, fun, warm and friendly. It's impossible to read the story without concluding the Mosscap is a very good person, save that it is very insistent that it is not a person. (Which is why it is firm that Dex is "they" and Mosscap is "it".)

(Entirely tangential, but for those who get the reference: especially in the audiobook version, Mosscap both sounds and behaves exactly like Elsbeth Tascioni from the TV shows The Good Wife, The Good Fight, and Elsbeth. The combination of surface goofiness but underlying cleverness and wisdom, plus unexpected wonder in the little things, was a similarity that kept striking me again and again.)

The first book is mainly just the two of them, finishing out Dex' quest for the monastery and some hoped-for insights to be found there; the second is them wandering from village to village in the human side of the world, with Mosscap asking person after person "What do you need?" in an attempt to understand how humanity has fared over the past couple of centuries. There are no easy answers to be found for any of it, but the journey is an enlightening one for both of them.

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The whole thing is refreshingly free of content warnings: while there are some tense moments, they're generally not of the traumatic sort. It's a tale of two people (Mosscap's denial aside) becoming close friends, exploring and learning along the way.

One particular detail that I noticed concerns gender. Not only does this story feature two firmly non-binary protagonists, it's conspicious that that doesn't stop Dex from having a romantic and sexual life -- and throughout, their biological sex doesn't come into it. It's not loudly disavowed (as one sometimes sees) or anything like that -- it just isn't relevant, and the story never mentions it.

(Even more than Murderbot, this makes it a bit problematic to translate this story to a visual medium. One of the delightful things about text is that this aspect can remain firmly ambiguous, and that's pretty clearly deliberate.)

The posited human society is fascinating to think about. I can poke holes in its economics, but it makes a compelling argument for a quieter and simpler life that allows a lot of the toxins to drain out of the world.

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Summary: the two novellas together make a short novel -- if you can deal with a story that really isn't about plot, you should read it. If you liked Chamber's Wayfarers series, it's a must-read: it has many of the same good qualities, distilled down.