ingrid

A time of instability and change

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Ask Me About Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service.

Every day you get a picture of my dog, Whimsy.

There will be posts about books.

Also, apparently, opera.



In my second year of university, all I took was English courses, because a full course load of nothing but reading seemed like a good idea after a stressful, somewhat traumatic first year. It was a long time ago and over the course of my time at uni I read a lot, only some of it multiple versions of Beowulf, and doodled my way through hundreds of hours of lectures, but some things have stuck with me.

I think a lot about my short story (later science fiction) professor and his frustration with the colloquialising and simplification of the word 'awesome', how it had become synonymous with 'impressive' and 'cool', stripped of the nuance where it is something so impressive it frightens you. 'Awesome' is a regular part of my casual vocabulary and language evolves, but I feel for Professor Matheson; sometimes the word you need is the awesome with the deeper connotation, and it's frustrating to think a reader is going to miss the nuance of the word because of the way it's popularly used.

Which brings us to Rebecca Chambers' "A Psalm for the Wild-Built"; every word I want to use to describe it feels like it's been muddled or neutered by a combination of internet hot take discourse and marketing speak. I've settled on 'gentle', which isn't the same as 'cozy' or 'soft', 'safe' or 'unproblematic'. Gentle is mint tea, warm, hydrating, a caffeine-free invigorating that's also relaxing, but it can still burn your tongue. It's a loving cat resting in your lap, soft paws massaging your thighs with pressure that can turn to pain and blood. Gentle feels good, comforting, but there's a choice, a restraint; the capacity to hurt is still there.


A distant future, another planet, an age of robotics leading to sentient artificial intelligence, and not a conflict of man versus machine but the quiet aftermath of an agreement between humans and robots, a separation of their societies, a pact of no contact, and humans moving forward to create a post-robot society, striving always to exist fully but conscientiously.

A young monk sets off on a vague pilgrimage in response to a vague inner malaise and becomes the first human being to encounter a robot since the robots vanished into the greater wilderness. They talk and continue the pilgrimage together.

That's it.

It's a novella, not a novel, a bite-sized road tale, and Chambers builds a world with rising and falling technological ages and environmental awareness, shifting human philosophies and ways of life to support this bite with the structural soundness and visibility of a spiderweb. It manages to be a very far flung future piece of science fiction, acknowledging the mistakes and damage of human society, while envisioning something better, and also acknowledging that this is an ongoing process. There's no goalpost for a 'good' version of humanity, there's just humanity, constantly evolving and growing and learning about the world and itself and changing in response to that; that involves hard truths and hope in equal measure.

It's a smart, thoughtful, sincere book, charming and funny and cathartic. It's not a reading experience that coddles you, but it refreshes you like walking in a downpour.

If you've ever felt lost in life or lost in the woods, "A Psalm for the Wild-Built" is the book about robots you need.


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