A Review: A Psalm for the Wild Built

Title of Work: A Psalm for the Wild Built
Author: Becky Chambers
Dates Read: February 6th - March 31st, 2024
Format: Hardcover

Posted: Goodreads, March 31st, 2024
Rating: 3/5
Review:

I have to admit, this one took me a couple months despite being easy-breezy and short – solidly in novella territory. I got hung up on the first quarter, trudged a bit further, then ground to a halt for a few weeks about half way through. It turned out to be a happy conclusion for my reading journey and I found myself quite enjoying this one in the end. It’s a cozy sci-fi fantasy where everything almost went bad, only pantomiming that dark and gritty urban dystopia we’ve come to expect, before turning warm and fuzzy for good.

I’m very down with an optimistic take on the genre. The doom and gloom of foreboding steam escaping from greasy metal tubes against a cyberpunk skyline is a little played out. I suspect my resistance came from feeling a bit struck over the head with the social pandering in the world building portion. The SWM lodged deep in my reader-brain winced as each talking point was hammered into place, sure not to miss a single one. In this alternative world, everyone is super chill and nerdy and kinda gay and kinda mentally ill and definitely non-binary and at least part-time plant based consumer and (counterpoint!) religious but only because a godless future with sentient robots is about as cold and dystopian as it gets. These robots know sign language and don’t assume pronouns when meeting a human by chance on a crumbling wilderness road. Look, it’s not that I think these points don’t need to be made or that folks that happen to hold the royal flush of identity politics don’t deserve their canon (I get it, we’ve accumulated more SWM, cis-coded lit than could fit inside an NFL stadium in Cleveland without spilling over the top. Variety is wonderful and essential and I continue to welcome it). But I hope and pray for all things in style and with taste. Our species and the societies we’ve constructed to tame the wildness we came from are nuanced and elaborate. These constructions don’t always make sense and I applaud any who strive to sort out the pieces in search of a better formulation, a new way of being together. Our species are readers and thinkers of incredible note. We don’t need to be spoon fed from a bargain bin of pre-approved opinions on the social issues of the day. We crave the interleaving of flavors and notes and feelings in our stories that echo our living experience. Please, don’t beat the nuance and intricacy out of the tapestry as you try to dislodge the dust of convention and bigotry and close-mindedness and everything else.

Chambers happens to be quite the talented writer and her imagination, her skill with description of the seldom observed, won me over in the second half. After each row of the cloying inclusivity rubric had been checked off and I made it back around to the story, I found incredibly thoughtful, insightful takes on humanity’s relationship with the natural world, questions of purpose and existence, hints at how good things might be if we could find a way to live closer to the natural order, and philosophical assurances that we are enough just as we are. Chambers observes this imagined world beautifully and there’s so much color in the scurrying little organic sagas that carry on tirelessly underfoot, in unadultured streams, in crumbling corners of factory ruins, abandoned relics of humanity’s indulgence and near self-destruction. They carry on all the time, anywhere we allow them the time and space to do so.