I’d been eyeing this book for awhile.  It’s the first of a 2-book series, the first book, this one, has a sequel.  It’s basically about 2 creatures, one human, the other a robot, who live together in the wilderness set in the far-future. These kinds o books are often allegories and this is no different – it might very well be an allegory for something.

*******
A Psalm for the Wild-Built
by Becky Chambers 
2023 /  (151 pages)
Read by Em Grosland  4h 8m
Rating: A / science fiction 
(Monk and Robot Series –  #1 of 2)
*******

The human leaves his big city home and goes out into the wilderness where there are villages full of robots busily doing their thing.   The robot finds him there and tells him he’s there to help him. Dex, the name of the human doesn’t quite know what to make of this, but he doesn’t send the robot, “the splendid, speckled Mosscap,” away.  

Centuries ago, or so they say, the robots moved out of the city and to the countryside and were never seen again.  That’s the legend anyway; it happened thousands of years ago.

In the book’s time, Sibling Dex came to realize “they” wanted to leave the city.  So they left because there was no one and nothing to keep them back or prevent them from being a tea master when they got wherever they found themselves. But there was no one to help them either.  They wanted to go to a small village and be a tea monk, trading and selling tea between villages and to customers at their small shop.  

As I made pretty clear in the above paragraph, Dex claims no gender – S/he is a “they”. I’m really not fond of this (actually, it grates on me), because it makes it seem like there are two entities in one – a split personality? And what about verb tenses?  If “they” is only 1 entity, do you say “They is not home?” Or “They was home last night.”?  That’s treating the pronoun as if it were their name.  

But Robot is also non-gender and uses the pronoun “it.”  Chambers was consistent in this except in a couple instances (if I heard correctly) where the pronoun “she” was used for Dex.     Like …. “They stuck her hands in their pockets.”  

This happened in another book I read not long ago and it was also science fiction – I had to look it up – “The Mountain in the Sea.” by Ralph Nayler. (link to my review on this site)