Erik Eckel

I came across a refreshing observation in an initially surprising place, Becky Chambers’ A Psalm For The Wild-Built. The short solar-punk novel is the first installment in the so-called Monk and Robot duology.

After further researching the book and author (Chambers also writes the Hugo Award-winning Wayfarer sci-fi series), I learned A Psalm For The Wild-Built itself won the Hugo Award for Best Novella, joining the likes of such works as Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest and Martha Wells’ All Systems Red. That’s certainly good company. Maybe it’s not such a surprise, after all, that the story surfaced an intriguing insight.

The book tells the story of a monk (Sibling Dex) who’s dedicated their life to traveling the world of Panga on an ox-bike (think ebike) with a cozy enclosed wagon in tow. The monk, formerly a member of a gardening sect, changes disciplines after feeling unsettled in that role and begins serving tea to citizens needing a break or sympathetic ear. After several years practicing such service, Dex again becomes unsettled and feels they lack purpose or are failing to fulfill their potential. This crisis occurs about the same time Dex meets a robot, Splendid Speckled Mosscap, which was built by other robots using scrap pieces from earlier generation models.

The robot is a big deal because the once-widespread automated workforce gained consciousness and decided to check out. This history-changing event, known as the Transition, included a Parting Promise in which it was understood there would no longer be any contact between robots and humans. The robots just left.

And here’s where it gets interesting. While trying to buck up its traveling companion—they’re adventuring together to reach a long-abandoned hermitage because Dex feels driven to explore the historic location—Mosscap tells Dex “you keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live. That is all most animals do.”

Soon, in the same conversation, the robot asks “do you not find consciousness alone to be the most exhilarating thing? Here we are, in this incomprehensibly large universe, on this one tiny moon around this one incidental planet, and in all the time this entire scenario has existed, every component has been recycled over and over and over again into infinitely incredible configurations, and sometimes, those configurations are special enough to be able to see the world around them. You and I—we’re just atoms that arranged ourselves the right way, and we can understand that about ourselves. Is that not amazing?”

A little later in their talk, Dex asks Mosscap just how the idea of possibly living a meaningless life with no purpose sits with the robot. Mosscap’s answer is simple but telling. The robot says it’s OK with that potential outcome “because I know that no matter what, I’m wonderful.” Chambers adds, importantly, “there was nothing arrogant about the statement, nothing flippant or brash. It was merely an acknowledgment, a simple truth shared.”

That’s refreshing. Hustle culture, purpose-driven life tomes, beat-yesterday mantras and the like all conspire to help us forget such truths.

Looks like I should read the sequel, A Prayer For The Crown-Shy. Who knows what other epiphanies await?