Last week I finished A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, the second in the Monk and Robot duology. In the first book, A Psalm for the Wild-Built, we were introduced to the Monk, Dex, who journeyed into the wilderness looking for purpose. Dex found instead a robot, Mosscap, whose kind withdrew from human society centuries ago but now wanting to find out how the humans were getting on. Our travelers made an agreement: Mosscap would guide Dex to a ruined monastery that the latter felt drawn to, and in turn Dex would be Mosscap’s guide into human civilization. Crown Shy continues that story, following the two as they travel through various human communities and try to answer Mosscap’s question: What do humans need? This is a question Dex is still personally dealing with, grasping for purpose but finding nothing beyond this unexpected friendship and tour of the human lands. The philosophical conversation begun in the last novel continues here, with some brief looks into what human society is like. We are introduced to the currency of ‘pebs’, which reminded me strongly of the ‘obs’ of The Great Explosion: they’re not monetary units, but a way of quantifying and tracking how much a given person is contributing to those around them. The currency is thus fundamentally community-oriented. When Dex visits family, we see that open polyamory is the norm, which I personally doubt would be stable over the long term — there’s a reason it is vanishingly rare in human history. Although I enjoyed the characters and world of this book as much as the previous title, it was something of a disappointment because our look into human societies was so brief. It did teach me the word crown-shy, though, which describes the way trees limit their canopy growth so as not to crowd into their neighbors. Given the ecological aim of these novels — the way they’re depicting a human society that’s settled into smaller and sustainable ways of being — it was an appropriate image!