A Psalm for the Wild-Built

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Chambers, Becky. A Psalm for the Wild-Built. New York City: Tor.com Publishing, 2021. Solarpunk novella (160 pages).[1] "It is the first in the Monk & Robot duology, followed by A Prayer for the Crown-Shy set for release in 2022."[2]

Wikipedia entry notes the "rewilding"[3] of the setting "On a moon [..] where AI and robots are a distant myth" — until the protagonist encounters a robot and the two set out on a roadtrip. Note the depiction in the plot of "humans and robots having independence from one another;"[4] cf. and contrast The City of Mind in Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home and the motif of a split in evolution of humans and machine intelligence, with, perhaps, the stars going, so to speak, not to "Man" or our successors, as in A. C. Clarke's Childhood's End, but to AI; strongly contrast Vanamonde and "the Mad Mind" in Clarke's The City and the Stars.[5]

In a Facebook posting of 7 June 2022, Sandra J. Lindow praises Psalm's handling of gender with the genderless "tea monk" protagonist, and the setting "in an almost utopian future world where sentient robots have been set free to live life outside the human domain so that their abilities won't be misused."

As of 7 June 2022, Jeanne Griggs notes a useful brief review on line at "Necromancy Never Pays," dated August 1, 2021, at link here.[6]

RDE, finishing, with thanks to Sandra J. Lindow and Jeanne Griggs, 7/8Jun22