“‘Find the strength to do both,’” Mosscap said, quoting the phrase painted on the wagon.
“Exactly,” Dex said.
“But what’s both?”
Dex recited: “‘Without constructs, you will unravel few mysteries. Without knowledge of the mysteries, your constructs will fail. These pursuits are what make us, but without comfort, you will lack the strength to sustain either.‘”
“Is that from your Insights?” Mosscap asked.
“Yeah,” Dex said. “But the thing is, the Child Gods aren’t actively involved in our lives. They’re … not like that. They can’t break the Parent Gods’ laws. They provide inspiration, not intervention. If we want change, or good fortune, or solace, we have to create it for ourselves.
I read this one in a single sitting on a two-hour flight. The world of Psalm is a more advanced version of our own; in most ways you can think of, the book is a softer and more relaxed kind of science fiction. Our human society is living on a world known as “Panga”. Perhaps this world is a terraformed planet, or a rechristened Earth, but this is left unsaid. Chambers doesn’t feel the need of elaborating on the planet’s relationship to ours, if there is one. However, a chief distinction of the setting is that human society has witnessed and experienced a genuine revolution.
The book doesn’t need such terminology, but might say that Panga is “post-singularity”. Centuries before our narrative begins, we’re told of the “the Transition”, in which robots working in human factories spontaneously became sentient. Humanity offers the newly self-aware robots membership (or citizenship) in their society, but the robots decline and depart to the Pangan wilderness. In what I think best exemplifies the book’s fundamentally optimistic orientation and tone, humanity respects this choice, and goes on to reorganize its economy and patterns of settlement. This feature of the world’s history is so different from common tropes concerning encounters between human and machine conciousnesses.
Despite the intriguing world that Chambers weaves in the prologue, its shape is only gradually revealed to us. Psalm’s narrative focuses on Sibling Dex, a monk whose order is dedicated to Allalae, the child god of small comforts. We learn that Panga has only one city, and that bicycles (Ox engines) are the primary form of transit. All of this is revealed through Dex’s decision to leave the rooftop gardens of their temple to become a traveling tea monk. We’re surrounded by a world that’s vastly different from our own, but its problems are familiar. Dex is a kindly soul, but they’re feeling restless, unfulfilled, and burnt out.
Over the first and second chapters, we see Dex master the practice of serving tea, building a list of fans that eagerly await Dex’s scheduled visits to their towns. In another small way that Psalm’s world differs from ours, Dex’s character is nonbinary, and we never have an indication (at least that I recall) of this being unusual or stigmatized in the places that Dex visits. This isn’t a book where a person’s queerness is treated as a source of conflict, or implicated in why a character feels out of place in the society they live in. But, beyond providing color to the world, Dex’s presentation has some continuity with the second principle character: the wild-built robot Mosscap, an agender being.
We meet Mosscap in the third chapter, where I feel we reach the heart of the book. Dex has taken a hiatus from their tea-serving to journey to a long abandoned sanctuary. They encounter Mosscap after setting up camp during their first night off of the regular travel routes. Mosscap volunteered to serve as an emissary, serving to discover how humanity has been doing in the centuries since robot-kind departed.