What do humans need? Ask Becky Chambers in this beautiful little hope punk book, where we meet a non binary tea monk who meets a robot in the wilderness and muses upon what gives our lives meaning.
I'm a bit in love with Becky Chamber's writing - she writes from not only a queer perspective (it's not necessary to assign characters gender or define them via sexuality) as well as an anthropological one like Ursula Le Guin, challenging us to defy defining others according to our own understanding of the world, and an ecological one - what impact has humanity had on the planet, and how can we change this?
One of the cool things about this book is that nothing much happens. It's just a monk and a robot walking through the wilderness talking. Whilst that might sound boring, there's some pretty interesting things that they talk about and the setting of the book is fascinating, especially in light of what we disasters we think may befall us as AI takes over our society.
In Chamber's book, the robots became self aware, and realising they didn't want to be tools for humans anymore, didn't use them as batteries Matrix style or kill us all off, but just abandoned us completely, going into the wilderness. Humans agreed - they didn't try to control them or destroy them but gave them their freedom.
What's even more unbelievable is that humans realise they have completely fucked up the planet and deliberately changed their relationship with nature, rewidling large areas, making tech sustainable (everyone has a phone that lasts a lifetime) and consumption isn' t the organsing principle of society. You don't even need a career, and if you want one, you can choose it or change it whenever you like.
So for a few hundred years, no one has seen robots and robots haven't chosen to go back to investigate humanity. I mean one of Mosscap (the robots name themselves after things they see) friends spends years just watching stalagtites grow in a cave. Mosscap wants to find humans because it's genuinely super curious about them.
I love how this book isn't a utopia with issues or a dystopia with worse ones - there is no oppression, apocalypse or evil corps here - it's more about, what makes us satisfied when most of the big problems in society are fixed? Where do we find meaning? Certainly, in labour - there's no tech to do the work for us - but is that it? Some of the answers align with my own views about what it means to exist, so I found myself nodding as I went.
I could see Chamber's work here as a thoughtful animation, and there are some very sweet, touching and funny moments.
I did find myself longing for the world where the worst thing is wandering around wondering about the meaning of things, instead of just trying to survive on the basest level.
Whilst some might find the book overly simplistic, I agreed with the readers who found it like a refreshing cup of tea - it lingered with me for weeks as I thought about what it would take to have a world this far advanced. Perhaps a total annihalation of humanity first - but that's not what hopepunk is about. This book suggests we're bet
