A Psalm for the Wild-Built

[psocoptera]

A Psalm for the Wild-Built, first in Becky Chambers' new novella series. This felt very much like A Pandemic Book, although I seem to have put it on my to-read list in April of 2020, so maybe it was actually A Trump Book or An Election Book or some previous round of trauma, I don't have a good enough understanding of publication timelines to know when she must have been writing it. Anyways, it is warm and cozy and is clearly meant to be Warm And Cozy and yet asks interesting questions about what might still be hard in the better world (while offering a picture of what the better world might look like). I often like stories about sff monks and nuns and such, and this is a neat made-up religion. If you like Becky Chambers, you'll probably enjoy this; if you don't like Becky Chambers because you have a hard time keeping track of who all the characters are and which kinds of aliens are which, this novella radically strips down the cast to one POV and two characters (plus some extras and bit parts). It will probably end up in my Hugo nominees, which on the one hand feels premature to say and on the other hand it's in fact almost November and not unreasonable to be thinking about 2021 books. (The timeline is so weird this year, it's disorienting.)