Like our world, each settlement has a different personality, whether it is the mini-City of Stump, Shipwreck’s technophobic inhabitants, or the farm where Sibling Dex was born and raised. In A Prayer for the Crown Shy, Chambers returns to Panga and follows Sibling Dex and Mosscap as they travel through the different areas and settlements of Panga on their way to the City. Until the day a robot named Splendid Speckled Mosscap walked up to Sibling Dex, a tea monk, and asked “What do people need?” If you haven’t read Psalm For The Wild-Built yet, read that first.In 2021, Becky Chambers introduced readers to the moon of Panga, where, centuries ago, the civilization’s robots gained consciousness and, en masse, walked off into the surrounding wilderness and were never heard from again. Are we our bodies? What is consciousness? Why do we exist? And other things that aren’t coming to mind immediately. The main characters are endearing, there is humor throughout, some of the philosophical concepts she’s playing around with are age old ideas that humans have always thought about. This is a book with humor and a unique perspective, from an author I enjoy. I loved the feeling which the language of the book produced in me. I loved the descriptions of nature, the language used to sketch a society in which gender and sexuality are less fraught with conflict, and in which some of our pressing issues have been solved. I really loved A Psalm For The Wild-Built.
Together with his friend Sibling Dex, Moss Cap undertakes a tour of human settlements. He has emerged from the wilderness to meet with humankind, the first robot to do so in living memory. Moss Cap has embarked upon a diplomatic mission. In the first book we learn that the world was divided into a populated part belonging to humans, and the rest is wilderness and it is into this wilderness that robotkind retreated after they ‘awoke’ and rejected unpaid servitude en masse. And the world is enjoying a time of peace and healing after the collapse, which is only hinted at, though we know it was bad. This is a post-industrial world in which humans have learned the hard lessons of the industrial, nuclear, and digital ages in which humans value wildlife enough to abandon huge tracts of land to the animals in perpetuity, and put an end to all forms of industry that were destroying their planet.
The first novel in this series was almost transcendental it was so good. I’m not going to say that I’m disappointed, exactly.
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