Title: A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Book 1), A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (Book 2)
Author: Becky Chambers
Publication Dates: 2021, 2022
How I Got Them: Bought in print
Rating: 5 stars! 6! 7!

As I try to get myself back into the swing of full book reviews – and I hadn’t meant to go so long without any! I’m still reading plenty, but writing the reviews has proven too much for my brain lately – I wanted to talk about Becky Chambers’ two Monk & Robot novellas. I read them a few months ago, and they now live rent free in my brain forever. Hell, they are hooked into my ribs and refuse to let go. They made me Feel Things ™, and I was not prepared. I’d heard Becky Chambers was good at that, but these were the first of her books I’d read (I also own The Long Way to Small Angry Planet, but haven’t had a chance to read it yet).

Both books take place in a post-industrial, ecologically-rich utopian society called Panga, where centuries before the stories take place, the robots built to serve humans suddenly and mysteriously gained full sentience, put away their tools, and wandered off into the wilderness never to be seen or heard from again. The humans have since learned the error of their ways (in terms of industrialization, ecological destruction, etc), and now live without robots, mostly in balance with their environments, and at peace with each other. It is left up to guesswork and interpretation if this world is meant to be Earth far far in the future, or another world entirely, with many similarities.

In Panga, we meet the nonbinary (they/them) monk, Sibling Dex who, in the throes of a pervasive ennui and feeling of unfulfilled potential, leaves the safety and comfort of their home monastery to become a traveling tea monk. As a tea monk, they administer comfort, advice, and tea to the far-flung towns and villages on the outskirts of human civilization. Dex becomes very good at this, and highly loved and respected by the villages they frequent. Yet after a couple years, they find even this calling unsatisfying. Dex is filled with yearning, for peace or purpose or something they can’t even name. And so, on a whim, they start journeying out into the uncharted, unforgiving wilderness beyond the villages, in search of a centuries-lost monastery they read about in a history book.

On the way, Dex has the shock of their life when they stumble upon a robot, Splendid Speckled Mosscap, who has been sent by agreement with many other robots, to find humans and attempt to understand them, asking them “what do you need?” This is the first interaction between robots and humans since the robots disappeared centuries before.

Dex and Mosscap team up to travel to the lost monastery, engaging in deep philosophical debates along the way and building toward an odd and marvelous friendship.

The second book picks up directly from the ending of the first book, with Dex and Mosscap journeying back into human civilization so that Mosscap can meet with humans in each village and ask them its question: “what do you need?” On this journey, Mosscap faces its own sense of mortality, and realizes that it is changed merely through interaction with humans. Meanwhile, Dex continues to wrestle with their sense of dissatisfaction, lack of purpose, and desire for fulfillment. We also meet Dex’s family, see many, often contradictory, reactions as humans come face to face with a robot, and have more philosophical debates. While the ending of the second book is satisfying, I still find myself hoping for more. There’s been no talk of another novella yet. Perhaps these two are all Becky Chambers intends to say on the matter, but I hope she returns to Dex and Mosscap eventually.

The first book is essentially one long philosophical discussion wrapped in a beautiful package of lush idyllic wilderness, gentle friendship, and warm fragrant tea.

The second book continues that philosophical discussion, but with more interaction with other characters and a few uncomfortable moments as Dex and Mosscap deal with potentially less-tolerant humans. However, both books are gentle and quiet. Not a lot of “Plot” happens. Dex and Mosscap are traveling, but most of the journeying and tension is internal, emotional. The world and characters of these books are diverse and welcoming and comforting and thoughtful, and the questions asked by Dex and by the text are deeply human and complicated.

Dex’s dissatisfaction with their life could, on one level, be criticized as “first world problems.” After all, Dex’s world is utopian: peaceful and comfortable, people’s needs are met, their desires permitted and catered to wherever possible. No one, as far as one can tell, is starving, or being oppressed. What, then, is there to complain about? Nothing, really. Which is part of Dex’s problem, because they feel guilty about feeling unsettled and dissatisfied and unfulfilled. They feel they have no right to their dissatisfaction, but knowing this does not make the feeling go away.

And I think that’s where these books get at the heart of the matter. Mosscap asks the humans: “what do you need?” and most of the humans HAVE NO IDEA. Some of them seem perfectly content with what they have. Some of them simply don’t know how to answer the question. Some can’t even decide what the difference is between a “need” and a “want.” What does one need? What does one want? Are they the same thing?

Dex’s ennui is deeply human and real. A feeling I recognize in myself. They want happiness, but what is happiness? They want purpose, but each time they think they’ve found it it proves fleeting, unfulfilling, illusory. They fear that there is something wrong with them, something broken, so that nothing will ever feel RIGHT, even though everyone else around them seems just fine.

Dex asks:

“Still. Something is missing. Something is off. So, how fucking spoiled am I, then? How fucking broken? What is wrong with me that I can have everything I could ever want and have ever asked for and still wake up in the morning feeling like every day is a slog?”

I know this feeling intimately.

These books made me cry at least half a dozen times.

These books have fingers that dig into my sternum and grasp at the churning maelstrom of feeling beneath.

They don’t provide easy answers, but possibilities. Mosscap offers a wisdom born of nature, of thoughtful reflection and an almost Zen sensibility (Dex is a monk of a made-up “fantasy” religion concerning six gods, but I’d argue that they have a distinctly Buddhist quality to them).

Mosscap offers this particular bit of advice:

“You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! So do I! But if I wanted to crawl into a cave and watch stalagmites with Frostfrog for the remainder of my days, that would also be both fine and good. 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.”

Similarly, in the second book, Dex states:

“You don’t have to have a reason to be tired. You don’t have to earn rest or comfort. You’re allowed to just be. I say that wherever I go.” They threw a hand toward their wagon, its wooden sides emblazoned with the summer bear. “It’s painted on the side of my home! But I don’t feel like it’s true, for me. I feel like it’s true for everyone else but not me. I feel like I have to do more than that. Like I have a responsibility to do more than that.”

Of course, in our own world, where capitalism rages unchecked and survival is far from assured, we are not “allowed to just live” and we usually do have to work in order to justify our right to exist in the world. Rest has to be earned purely because society has demanded it. But the Monk & Robot books imagine a world where this might no longer be necessary and it’s a beautiful, hopeful thought.

The second book, Prayer for the Crown-Shy, pushes beyond this by suggesting that, perhaps, the answer is in our connections with other people. In our friendships, and loves, and communities. As Dex and Mosscap travel through parts of Panga in the second book, stopping at each village to ask people what they need, the answer (not always explicitly stated, but often implied by their own interactions with people), is EACH OTHER. This is true for Dex as they reconnect with their family, and make possibly romantic connections with someone they meet while traveling. But it is at its most true at the end when, having nearly reached their final destination and inevitable separation, Dex and Mosscap stop where they’re at. Because they’d rather stay together. They find an answer in each other, in their companionship and gentle, complicated, beautiful friendship.

Dex says:

“What if that is enough, for now? What if we’re both trying to answer something much too big before we’ve answered the small thing we should have started with? What if it’s enough to just be…Us.”

Is it enough? I don’t know. In THIS world, possibly not. But what a hopeful, marvelous idea that it someday could be.