A first time foray into the cosypunk science fiction worlds of Becky Chambers. Based on the reviews, I’d say this is a relatively representative sampling of her work and VERY short, so it is not only a low stakes book, but even the length of this short story is a fairly gentle commitment. If you like science fiction, this seems like a safe investment of your time.
Plot: Sibling Dex is frustrated. They felt stifled in the monastery and so took off for a new adventure conducting tea ceremonies on the road, but this too failed to lift the pall that has fallen on their life, so they decide to go off road. One of the first encounters they have in the conserved wild land outside of the enclaves set aside for habitation is a robot. This is quite surprising, as they gained sentience a few hundred years ago, and took off into the wilderness, never to be heard from again. And this one is very curious. Shenanigans ensue.
It’s refreshing to find science fiction that is still in any way hopeful about our future. And unlike Star Trek or Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time and Children of Ruin, we don’t need to go through cataclysmic catastrophe or twenty first. This world is charming, if entirely lacking in substance.
And that’s sort of my issue with this story. I don’t expect a short story to give me a fully fleshed out world but it feels like it was built by of a city person spending a lot of time watching homesteading videos on Youtube and believes we can feed the whole world with a bunch of cute family farms. It is not a post-scarcity world, but people are acting that way anyway. You can apparently start travelling the country by carriage making tea and scones for people without charging anything and also providing (untrained) therapy to each person. Where did the money come from for the carriage or the supplies? Are people just handing them out now? Humanity apparently left the majority of the world to reduce its impact and harm on the world, but there is apparently no difficulty getting lumber or tea or produce or anything else for that matter. Also, no huge issue with forest fires despite the fact when, at least here in North America, we abandoned the way Indigenous people have managed forests for millennia (controlled forest fires to clear brush) and opted for a “just don’t touch it” conservation approach, we saw forest fires skyrocket across the entire continent and wreak untold destruction both on forest creatures and also on any human residences within *hundreds* of miles.
So the world is sort of nonsense, and the worldbuilding and its underlying philosophy is the entirety of the book. So let’s talk about the underlying philosophy, because there are no characters here really, just convenient mouthpieces for said philosophy. And the philosophy is mostly just spending a lot of words to say the same thing as memes on social media like “I don’t dream of labor” or “you don’t have to justify existing.” It is broad and entirely uninterested in engaging sincerely with the concepts it is challenging. This sort of thing just feels lazy. Who the hell said anyone needs to justify their existence? There is a world of difference between “you should be able to do whatever you want to do and a strong social safety net is an essential way society supports you doing that” and “society should have to shoulder the burden of taking care of you because you shouldn’t have to do anything for society to owe you a standard of living you have chosen for yourself, and also they shouldn’t do anything you don’t agree with to be able to get the resources to support you.”
So basically, if you already agree with Chambers’ philosophy, you’ll like the book. If you don’t, I doubt you will be compelled by it, and there’s precious little else here.