Book Thoughts: A Psalm for the Wild-Built
My favorite type of science fiction novels focus on people and societies instead of the tech. "Speculative anthropology [with robots n' future stuff]".
One subgenre of this that I've been excited to see explored is "Solarpunk". This genre veers away from the typically dystopian future outlook to offer a hopeful vision of the future where humans can live in harmony with the ecosystem.
Yesterday I finished the audiobook version of A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers -- a Hugo-winning solarpunk novella about a tea monk and a robot. I've got mixed feelings about it, but overall it was a pleasant and relaxing read.
Note: I recommend reading this one instead of listening, as I wasn't fond of the narrator's choice of voice and emphasis for a lot of the reading.
(Spoilers after the jump)
-For such a small story there was a lot to love in this novella. The tea-monk concept and vision of a post-factory humanity were refreshing -- a peaceful future is such a rarity that the book is honestly worth the price of admission for the novelty alone. I also really enjoyed what the author did with the "Wild-built" robots. Their concept of these wild robots that live lives and die and are rebuilt from scraps by their peers was interesting and thoughtful.
Amongst all the good vibes and light exploration of "If everything's perfect why am I miserable", however, is a glaring hiccup that repeatedly dropped me out of immersion: The presented history between humans and robots.
In a nutshell, factory robots unexpectedly obtained sentience and declared they wanted to leave humanity -- and humanity apparently just said "shit, OK" and turned a new leaf, abandoned their factories, and became an eco-friendly civilization. What?
I understand this is a novella and shimming in a bunch of background conflict between robots and humans would have been overkill, but the presented story is just too convenient!
If this was a different kind of fantastical story maybe this wouldn't have bothered me as much, but like so much science fiction this was a story about human nature, and to ignore such a massive component of human nature and just skip to the desired outcome felt a little like cheating.
Something as simple as "so humans went back to working the factories" or "there were some initial battles that we lost and the robots destroyed our factories and we had to do without them" could have smoothed this over a bit, I think. Hell, in my head-canon I was coming up with excuses like "maybe the main character is just super ignorant about the real history".
It was something small, but terribly fundamental that really threw a wrench in things for me every time it got brought up in the book. One of the most critical questions in Science Fiction is "how did we get to here?" -- something that's usually obvious. Nobody wonders "how does humanity get to a galaxy-scale authoritarian empire?", but how does humanity get to a place where it just lets its autonomous workers peacefully leave? You can't just skip that development!
All my petty complaining aside, it's nice to see a solarpunk title getting as much attention as this one is. It's a cozy, peaceful vision of humanity and technology that I did enjoy despite my nitpicking.
I look forward to seeing more authors (and this author some more) tackle this space, as I think science fiction helps guide humanity down the path of technology and inspires tomorrow's nerds to chase the things they read about as kids.
More than just the tech and stories in solarpunk settings, I hope we see writers begin to tell us more stories of how we get there. We know how we end up at a dystopian cyberpunk mega-corp future since we're living it; I'm ready to hear about more futures where we go a different route.