2021 science fiction novella, first of a planned series. Dex is a monk
who feels hemmed in in the city; going out and serving
tea-and-relaxation to villagers seems like a reasonable change. But
it's not the answer.
Yes, all right, I might like to know more about this planet and
its history, and how it came to be that all the robots suddenly gained
consciousness and left, so that the humans ended up rebuilding a
much lower-impact society, and it's now later enough that no living
human has ever actually met a robot… but that's just hinted at in the
gaps between the story of Sibling Dex and the robot Mosscap, who meet
in the wilderness.
There's little in the way of physical threat, though there is some
ground to traverse that's returned to native forest; Dex is looking
for inner peace in solitude, Mosscap wants to learn what humans want,
and each is something of a misfit in terms of their societies. Those
things and how they deal with them are far more important than
fighting could be.
This is the sort of thing Chambers does very well, and she does it
again. This is less a novella in itself than it is part one of a
longer story, and it has very little by way of conclusion, but what
there is is distinctly promising.
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