Review: A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“It doesn’t require pockets, it just fits in one.”

The story picks up more or less exactly where the last dropped off. Our Monk pal, Dex, is taking their new robo-buddy, Mosscap, into town to meet the locals and, hopefully, get some proper answers to its questions.

"Mosscap had come to meet humanity as a whole; that was who Dex had informed.
It made sense, Dex supposed, that everyone had written back."

After a little fanfare, Mosscap gets a chance to ask the locals, "What do you need?" Which is naturally met with some polite but bemused laughter from the crowd.

Mosscap gets to helping humans with some of their trivial chores and makes it into an opportunity to learn what it can about us, while hitting the books in its downtime allows it to start pondering the nature of its own consciousness.

"...complex intelligence and self-awareness arise out of an external need. A social need, an environmental need, whichever. Something pushed those creatures into needing to be more clever.” Its eyes glowed more brightly. “So, what sort of need pushed us robots into waking up?”

We learned in book one that the robots allow themselves to die as their parts wear down. This gives them a natural sort of life cycle and allows them to build new units from the recovered remains of past units.

“There’s no escaping entropy.”

Rather unexpectedly Mosscap is, for want of better terminology, taken ill. Even though Dex respects robot culture they can see a simple fix and don't understand the robot's decision to call it the end of the road.

“We could glue this, probably. If I sprained my ankle, I wouldn’t lie down on the road and be like ‘Guess I’ll die here.’”

Fortunately, from our perspective as very human readers who have already fallen madly in love with Mosscap, Dex thinks they have a solution that will heal (repair) Mosscap without violating its principles. The robot isn't immediately convinced but agrees to consider the suggestion.

And I think this interaction quite aptly portrays a lot of what these two stories have been about. Respecting each other even when they don't understand each other. Not expecting an immediate response and giving each other the space and the power required to make their own meaningful choices.

“So … your body is simultaneously you and not you.” Mosscap’s head whirred so loudly, it sounded as though it might take flight. “Where do you draw the line, between body and self?”

There's an interesting discourse on what makes you, you which is in essence the old example about replacing the planks which make a ship over the course of many years. When you replace the first few planks it seems obvious that it is the same ship but when every plank has been replaced at least once it begs the question of whether it is in fact the same ship at all.

"Part of me thinks that would be simply marvelous. What better way to be a student of nature than to have a piece of it within me? But then … would I be changing something fundamental about my nature?”

Well, Mosscap comes up with a perfect solution to its particular problem anyway and one that I should have seen coming but I suppose that I was distracted enough by the story to not be guessing ahead at all.

For someone (me) who can't stand sex in stories, I thought that for once in this story it was done goddamn right. This is how you write sex into a story folks. Acknowledge how great it is. Acknowledge that it occurs. Make a few light jokes about it. Move on. MOVE ON! For crying out loud I don't need to hear what it felt like when your sticky bits interacted. So thank you Becky Chambers. *tips hat*

Now. Much like in the first story, I think that not much happens in this one. But, perhaps because I started with a connection to the characters and didn't need to spend paragraphs developing that, it seemed like all the small things felt much more significant.

Our pair basically walk and talk and meet a few interesting people on their way and that's most of the story. I mean there's a little fishing, an afternoon of speed boating and the aforementioned one night stand which occur in their leisure time but they aren't out to slay a dragon or fundamentally affect anything other than perhaps their own ideas.

I think all of the discourse in this one was as topically loaded as the first book too, but somehow it flowed more naturally this time. I think perhaps the discussions arose out of circumstance better and so didn't feel manufactured to deliver a message.

I would say that the writing in this is much better overall but for someone as well received as Chambers it's probably a moot point. However, I will say that I found it weirdly refreshing to have so simple a narrative be so compelling and I would recommend these stories to scifi readers looking for a quick and pleasant read.

“Why is that funny?” Dex asked.
“Because it’s so very human, and I am not. And it’s not funny, it’s delightful."

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