What do people need? Dex is a garden monk who should, by all accounts, enjoy a perfectly happy life. Health, a meaningful job, people who love them — what’s missing? Dex doesn’t know. After departing from the monastery to pursue a slightly different, if adjacent vocation — that of tea monk, offering herbal tea and a listening ear to those who are stressed or in need of trouble, Dex continues to wrestle with a feeling of emptiness and disatisfication. As invigorating as the new challenge is, it’s still not quite enough — and so, Dex sets out past the limits of human civilization, venturing into the wilderness to see if they might hear the crickets cry. Even knowing the dangers that are out there — bears, river wolves, disasters — Dex has an urge to move forward. The push into the wild results in Dex being greeted by an robot which calls itself Mosscap, and Mosscap is also looking for an answer. Centuries ago, robot intelligences chose to withdraw from human society, but they have remained curious about their creators — and Mosscap has volunteered to go to the humans and see how they’re getting on. Dex reluctantly agrees to guide Mosscap through human society, but only if Mosscap will take Dex deeper into the wilderness, to an abandoned hermitage that was the site of the last recorded cricket chirps. Psalm for the Wild-Bult is an interesting kind of science fiction, as it’s essentially an extended conversation about existentialism in a solarpunk context. The worldbuilding is compelling in its own right, as we’re offered a vision of a human society that has found a way to live in harmonious comfort with Nature, and has done for for at least centuries. That steady-state has led to frustration for some, like Dex, whose inexplicable distress at the start of the novel testifies to the truth that both Captain Kirk (“This Side of Paradise”) and Carl Sagan observed: we are homo viator, man on a journey — forever striving, exploring. Plotwise, this is not a grand story: it’s simply a monk and a robot traveling and talking. I happen to have a hearty appetite for this kind of introspective discussion (there’s a reason Alain de Botton is one of my very favorite authors, and why I’ve watched My Dinner with Andre), so between that and the solarpunk setting I was delighted with this.

Highlights:

“So, the paradox is that the ecosystem as a whole needs its participants to act with restraint in order to avoid collapse, but the participants themselves have no inbuilt mechanism to encourage such behavior.”
“Other than fear.”
“Other than fear, which is a feeling you want to avoid or stop at all costs.”

“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 themselves the right way, and we can understand that about ourselves. Is that not amazing?”

“We’re machines, and machines are objects. Objects are its.”
“I’d say you’re more than just an object,” Dex said.
The robot looked a touch offended. “I would never call you just an animal, Sibling Dex.” It turned its gaze to the road, head held high. “We don’t have to fall into the same category to be of equal value.”

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.”