Becky Chambers' A PSALM FOR THE WILD-BUILT

Ok, this is probably a sad thing to admit, a commentary on the books I've chosen over the years, as much as it is on the quality of the book at hand, but I don't think I've been as charmed by a novel since I first discovered Nathan Lowell's Solar Clipper series or the work of Walter Moers. Becky Chambers' first Robot and Monk book, A Psalm for the Wild-Built, is a delightful portrait of the kind of future I want and with its dual main characters and the gently hopeful plot they enact, an endlessly engaging read. 

It's just so short, though!

Leave 'em wanting more, the adage goes. And I do want more!

There's something almost cruel, though, in the experience of reading books like this; they show us how perfectly reasonable is the near-utopia they depict, show us all the nice things we could have if enough of us would just do a little bit of work towards trying to make our  world less shitty for more people, but every interruption or sound on the street or twinge in our bodies reminds us of all of the ridiculous and ridiculously powerful forces are pulling in the opposite direction, trying to make the world more shitty for more people all because their imaginary sky daddy or philosophy-that's-more-important-than-actual-people or just shitty personalities (or all three, in the case of who I now insist we have to stop calling The Former Guy and instead refer to as The Indicted Guy. Plus, the abbreviation, TIG rhymes with a word that also describes him) insist that change for the better is Bad and will lead to Oppression of the Minority that has been Oppressing all the Other Minorities for Centuries. Which would apparently be Unjust in a way that all the other oppression has not been?

Anyway. Psalm for the Wild-Built shows us a terraformed (or possibly already life-supporting?) moon orbiting a gas giant, originally settled by human beings who brought advanced robot technology with them when they came but whose robots achieved self awareness -- and the humans who settled this moon were humane humans who understood it was wrong to enslave thinking and feeling beings even if they're ones we created, and gave the robots their liberty. The robots then withdrew completely from human society and went off into the wilderness to explore and witness and enjoy without harming. Meanwhile the humans the robots left behind adapted their culture into a solarpunk utopia, but it's not just the energy and technology they developed and continue to employ that are utopian, but they've developed an easy-going polytheistic religion that doesn't proscribe or prescribe but just functions as a way of understanding the experience of being alive and appreciating the world and each other.

Our point of view character, a non-binary human named Dex, has served in a monastic order within this religion (purely by choice; no economic or social pressures affected their choice, either!) in the capacity of a novice but has, as our story opens, chosen to become only the most delightful religious vocation that has been thought of in the history of ever, a Tea Monk. Whose vocation is to travel the moon by means of a heavy-duty bicycle and camper-trailer combo, stopping at each human settlement and setting up a shrine, not at which to pay or offer sacrifice or take instruction, but at which to set down in a pretty setting among a few choice nice things that have some devotional significance but aren't especially valuable -- they're there to be nice things, not to inspire awe or envy -- and have a cup of tea, provided by the Tea Monk, after he/she/they have greeted you, determined your general physical/emotional state, and decided what blend of botanicals to infuse into a brew that will taste good to you and help you feel better. Once served with a nice cup of tea, you can then relax and enjoy it in silence, make idle chitchat, or pour your heart out to the Tea Monk as you see fit.

A good Tea Monk -- and Dex grows to become one of the best if not the best -- travels on a nearly completely self-sufficient basis thanks to the wonder of modern water filtration/food preservation/hygiene/life-support/comfort technology embodied in the trailer/bicycle rig, but is often offered a nice hot meal or a soak in a devotee's big bathtub or local hot springs or a roll in the hay, etc as thanks for how well he/she/they apply their vocation. Dex has enjoyed this life for a long time, but feels that something is missing and develops a yen to travel off the beaten path a while, into the untouched wilderness that exists off the actual beaten paths between settlements Dex has traveled these years.

Within a patch of actually wild nature, Dex encounters a being no one has in centuries -- a robot! And we learn that the robots, too, have developed a very easy-going and appreciative culture of their own. For instance, their naming convention has drifted far from the alpha-numeric designations of their forebears who wandered out of the Factories so long ago; now when a new robot comes to awareness, it takes its name from the first thing it observes. So this robot is named Splendid Speckled Mosscap, Mosscap for short, after the mushroom that it first saw the day it came to be. And boy, is Mosscap a wonderful character!

Mosscap has a unique mission for which it volunteered; to renew contact with humanity and find out "what humanity needs." Dex persuades Mosscap that it will need to consult someone besides Dex to answer this question; Mosscap in turn persuades Dex to let it accompany them on its travels, to help Dex along and keep them safe. And thus is formed a beautiful and delightfully weird friendship despite a certain degree of mutual unintelligibility.

You're an animal, Sibling Dex. 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 it!... 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.

Mosscap's wisdom is the wisdom that built both the robots' and the humans' societies, only most individuals don't immediately seem to recognize it. Will Dex come truly to understand and embrace this, or will they continue to frustratedly wander the moon seeking this thing called "a purpose"? Or will Dex get eaten by a bear before Mosscap can rescue them?

I'm pretty freaking glad the sequel is already available. I just have to wait for a few dozen library patrons who requested it first to finish it. Meanwhile, it's just wonderful to know that books like this are (still) a thing, and I'll be checking out Becky Chambers' other series... as soon as I get my turn on those, too. The fact that in Wyoming, which to judge by our voting records is mostly full of the kind of people who claim not to want the kind of world that Solarpunk/Hopepunk exists to imagine, so many people are waiting to get a hit of what Chambers is slinging is as comforting as the books themselves.

Ahh!

Now, wait'll you get a load of the non-fiction I've been reading that this was a break from. 

Janelle Monae's THE MEMORY LIBRARIAN AND OTHER STORIES FROM DIRTY COMPUTER

The summer of 2018 was a challenging one for me. Due to a medication I'd been put on for a chronic health condition, the slow growing cataracts we'd first discovered in both of my eyes when I was in my early 30s (it's mostly caused by frequent/long-term steroid use and nobody ever talks about this as a consequence so educate yourself on this before it happens to someone you know and care about) were suddenly maturing like crazy. An operation I'd been told I'd maybe need someday when I was in my 60s was suddenly necessary very, very soon -- except I also had glaucoma that wasn't responding to ordinary treatment measures. The cataract surgery couldn't happen until this was brought under control. Meanwhile, my world was disappearing in, not so much a cloud as a blinding refraction that multiplied every image by five. I wasn't just seeing double, I was seeing quintuple.

The last thing I remember watching on TV was the Emotion Picture Janelle Monae & co. made to accompany her then-new album, Dirty Computer. I might have seen a baseball game or something as the actual last thing, but I watched Dirty Computer over and over and over again. It wasn't just great music and beautiful visuals, it was really good, fully imagined science fiction with a fully realized world, intensely believable characters and incredible high-stakes tension. Plus, the imagery employed made it feel like it was made just for me, even though I'm a cisgender ace woman from White-oming, aka someone with very little in common with the divine Cyndi Mayweather. Even as I watched for the 14,000th time, even as I listened with delight to the album (which I bought on physical media because someday some jackwagon is going to buy up the streaming services that host it and delete it as too controversial or whatever), I wanted to know more about this world Janelle and her co-creators had dreamed up, which is a dystopia every bit as terrifying as the fucking Handmaids but is fully inclusive of the BIPOC/LGBTQA+ people of the world in a way dear old Atwood never quite is.

Anyway, the divine Mayweather heard my prayers and had already pretty much answered them, only book publishing do take its own sweet time to get stuff into my hot little hands, don't it?

The stories in The Memory Librarian are collaborations between Monae and a small cadre of award winning writers of speculative prose fiction, and while each co-writer has a resume that should impress any critic, their individuality disappears in service of the whole work; each story shares not only a world and a handful of characters drawn from Dirty Computer but also a clear and straightforward prose style that makes The Memory Librarian feel like the work of one amazing hive mind. Ordinarily I'd find this a little disappointing; I look to anthologies in part in order to find new-to-me-writers to stalk from afar and I usually end up with a favorite whose works I then move forward to devour greedily. In this case, though, well, I'm just going to have to follow them all like one of the creepy surveillance droids that loom in all of these stories. Except I'm hoping I won't be noticed, that they won't run away. I'm not really an NDR (New Dawn Robot, I think is what that stands for?), I just look like one, really! Hello...? 

That being said, I do have a favorite story, the longest entry, "Nevermind," which functions the most as a direct sequel to Dirty Computer as it expands on the themes and imagery -- and the fates of its principle characters -- of Monae's original Emotion Picture. "Nevermind" finds Monae's character, Jane, resident of the Pynk Hotel (the scene of the music video with the infamous vagina pants), where a motley assortment of the kind of marginalized/minority characters that are most at risk of being abused and wiped out in both our world and that of Monae's imagined future, in which a techno-dystopian power known as the New Dawn has seized power in the United States (or maybe all of North America? Or maybe the whole world?) and put a terrifying combination of surveillance technology that can penetrate even into a person's thoughts and memories and a gas called Nevermind that can be used to erase those thoughts and memories, the better to re-program a person into a perfect "clean" citizen of the New Dawn's Orwellian world. At the end of Dirty Computer, Jane, her girlfriend Zen, and their boyfriend Ché escaped from a facility in which all three of them had undergone various degrees of Nevermind treatment and brainwashing; the last hopeful scene has the trio clearing the exit and leaving the New Dawn behind, hopefully forever.

As "Nevermind" (co-written with Danny Lore) opens, we learn that it was to the Pynk Hotel that Jane and Zen escaped (we don't hear much about Ché), and that the Hotel is a hidden location in the desert where BIPOC/LGBTQIA+ and any other misfit women can make a life and all the art they want as long as they contribute some of their talents toward keeping the place running. But there is trouble in paradise: there are hints that New Dawn has come close to sniffing them out, and some of the residents of the Pynk Hotel don't have quite as inclusive an idea of who is welcome there as Jane et al would like. The story takes Monae's original work's focus on the endless struggle of the individual against the forces of society who want conformity at any price and both expands and contracts it, broadening its inclusiveness while narrowing in on the experiences of one resident at Pynk who has become a protege of reluctant not-officially-leader Jane but is treated with suspicion by a faction within the community in a sad analogy of, say, 21st century feminism's internal debates (which, how is this debate still even happening, you guys?) over who, exactly, counts as a woman.

Other stories bring us into the world of a high official of the New Dawn. "The Memory Librarian" (co-written with Alaya Dawn Johnson),  is a bit of a taller poppy than she at first would seem but is struggling to keep that a secret even as she secretly tries to help others like her survive in the city she guides and keeps Clean for the New Dawn. When her mission and her heart come into irreconcilable conflict, the tension over how she will handle it becomes almost unbearable and doesn't quite resolve as the story nonetheless comes to a satisfying conclusion. As I said, Monae chooses her co-creators wisely (witness all of the incredible music videos she's unleashed over the years).

Another stand-out is "Timebox Altar(ed" (co-written with Sheree Renée Thomas in which a group of children, many of whom have been effectively orphaned by the New Dawn's habit of kidnapping non-conforming adults for "Cleaning" without much regard for the welfare of any offspring they may have, follow a series of incredibly subtle memory-clues to find an all-but-enchanted locale that gives them each a glimpse of a better future in which each of them has, as adults, helped to create, a message of hope that reaches beyond The Memory Librarian's pages to all of us as we watch our kind-of, almost pluralistic, wannabe egalitarian maybe someday society come under threat, not from fancy sci-fi gadgets and gases, but the same bullshit intolerance and bigotry that's always held us back. While we probably shouldn't ever get too comfortable with the idea that these forces can be defeated forever (as isn't quite suggested in the world these kids get to glimpse but could be), sometimes it's nice to at least think about how a better world can still be possible and might even be in our reach.

Someday, though? We really need to stop just believing that the kids are going to fix things. We were the kids once, did we?

Anyway, I hope this collection isn't the last we see from these creators and in this world. Monae has tapped into some powerful, powerful veins that still have plenty of good ore in 'em.