The departure of robots apparently becomes a catalyst for the betterment of humanity. In this world a long time ago robots somehow gained consciousness and parted ways with humanity to live in the wilderness, respecting each other’s choices and agency. I’m scared, and I’m lost, and I don’t know what to do.” I can’t stay here, but I’m scared about going back and having that feeling pick right back up where it left off. I don’t know what I thought I’d find out here, because I don’t know what I’m looking for.

I was so sick of it that I did a stupid, dangerous thing, and now that I’ve done it, I don’t know what to do next. “My work doesn’t satisfy me like it used to, and I don’t know why. Because people will still have existential crises and will get hit with wanderlust even in the most inconvenient times. Finding a limit they’d stick to was victory enough.” It’s a story of a utopia, a planet where humanity left behind the Factory Age and moved on to sustainable and highly spiritual (as opposed to dogmatically religious) life in harmony with nature, with dwellings made of biodegradable materials, half a planet left for wilderness with which you do not interfere, and existence of tea monks who travel from scenic village to scenic village setting pop-up tea shops where one can drink their sorrows away with herbal teas. But then, humans had a knack for throwing things out of balance. 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. 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. Ever since her first novel The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet she’s been writing what I can only call “comfort science fiction/ cozypunk”, showing the worlds where you would really love to live, the worlds that learned from mistakes of the past and moved on in better directions, the worlds mostly inhabited by genuinely nice people, with everything having a feeling of an unironically happy hippie commune, complete with earnest conversations about life and its meaning.Īnd that’s what we get here, in a tiny contemplative novella whose dedication simply states, “For anybody who could use a break.” “This had been the way of things since the Transition, when the people had redivided the surface of their moon. If this is not your first Becky Chambers book, you know what to expect.

A psalm for the wild build