Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

 I mean, it was fine, I guess?

There've been plenty of breathlessly positive reviews of Becky Chambers' low-key lovely little novella A Psalm for the Wild-Built (which looks to be the first in a series), and this isn't going to be one of those. Mind you, this also isn't posted by a cranky Redditor, either.

I want to like solarpunk, or hope-punk, or whatever we're meant to be calling it now, I really do. Dystopia isn't the right frame for where we're at and where we're heading, in terms of either climate or culture: dystopia's tempting, and it'll give you grandeur and drama and tragedy, but with solar power ticking rapidly upward etc, it's no longer accurate to the time (if it ever was). And so I want to like solarpunk, but I'm going to need some recommendations, because Psalm for the Wild-Built didn't help me very much.

It's a well-written little book, and I liked the two characters that we spend any time with, and I appreciated that it was deliberately twee. I've got nothing against cottagecore, and this is basically cottagecore with wildly advanced technology derived from biomimicry, thus making it barely visible, so I should've liked the book.

And it was fine enough. As Amal El-Mohtar puts it in her review for NPR, A Psalm for the Wild-Built has no conflict or tension, but remains mostly interesting; the main character "leads a good, comfortable life in a good, comfortable world.... It's a book rooted in depictions of comfort and questions about what might drive someone to seek discomfort in a world where everyone's basic needs are met."

Maybe it's just that I need the novel that gets us to that world, rather than gives us that world already formed. Sure, yes, my job as the reader is to imagine the context and conditions behind the world we're presented, so I've been given the opportunity of a valuable thought exercise of imagining how to get to a happy future, but it feels a little like being offered a time-share condo.

And that has a lot to do with how Fantasy it feels, even though it isn't fantasy, not really. But it's set on a moon orbiting a planet in a galaxy other than ours. The moon has a 20-hour day, and a long-divided planetary surface: 50% ocean, where the people don't go; 25% people-centric; and 25% "wild" land where the people don't go. There's no war, no conflict between groups (even though the different areas, geographically divided by landform, take distinct cultural forms).

I bought this one in hardcover, because it was two days before Beer & Books meets to discuss it (tomorrow!), but I'm not buying the next one in hardcover. And probably I won't buy it at all, unless someone gets seriously persuasive.