A Psalm for the Wild-Built

Becky Chamber's works are rare among science fiction stories because instead of action-adventure plots they're about people talking about what it means to be alive.

The first couple of chapters felt like the plot was jumping around a hell of a lot, because they're really just backstory/preamble for the actual story

It's good that there will be a sequel because I do want to know what both Mosscap and Dex will do next

Well-written. Funny. Cute, even. The characters are wonderful, and I am looking forward to their continuing adventures.

A gorgeous poke at a plausible, palpable, provocative world. Also: a timely addition to the "sad-happy speculative fiction" corpus.

Read this in Teixcalaan recovery mode and loved it. I think I was supposed to find it optimistic and cozy etc etc and I did. But I also found deep sorrows hiding in its slant looks at how we live now. So: it's about stopping to rest but it's also about getting the purpose to do better.

A short work delivered with wit, insight, and a hopeful vision of the future. Sibling Dex and Mosscap are characters that bounce off each other wonderfully, as the book peddles along at an easy clip.

If ever a work felt like a breath of fresh air, this is it.

There isn’t much I can add to loppear@bookwyrm.social’s review; once again, Chambers is simply wonderful. Here, she is running with the wholesome if slightly insipid promise for the future Solarpunk holds to explore human condition and (not entirely incidentally, I suspect) thumb a very long nose at the whole “machine uprising” crowd. I don’t know how someone can be so relentlessly, melancholically upbeat, but I do know I had to finish this before work, and that I had a little happy cry when I did.

A monk looking for a purpose meets a robot. They both have much to discover from each other, as they tackle the meaning of life.

Short as it is, this book might serve as an introduction to a larger body of work set in the same world, but it also works well alone from other expectations.

I'd love to see more of that world, a sort of solarpunk utopia where suffering, or illness, or poverty, seem very foreign. The robot wants to check in on humanity, to ask them what they need, what the population of wild robots could help them with. What are the need of a society that's got everything? I'm curious. I want to read more.