Last month, Brookline Booksmith hosted Martha Wells (Fugitive Telemetry) and Becky Chambers (A Psalm for the Wild-Built) in conversation—and now, anyone can watch it! The bookstore has posted their hour-long discussion on YouTube for all to see.
Chambers’ new novella, A Psalm for the Wild-Built, is the story of a tea monk who encounters a robot in the woods. The robots of Panga attained sentience ages ago, and no one has seen one since, but this one has come back to the human world to ask a seemingly simple question: What do people need?
Wells’ latest is an entry into her beloved Murderbot series, which began with 2017’s All Systems Red. This time, Murderbot finds a dead body on Preservation Station and reluctantly assists human security in figuring out what happened.
The two discuss outlining (or not); television watching (Wells, like all wise viewers, enjoys Elementary); how much time Chambers thought about tea while writing Psalm; writing with compassion for your characters; and how excellent it is that more voices are telling their stories in SFF.
If you haven’t yet read the authors’ new books, you can read an excerpt from A Psalm for the Wild-Built here, and one from Fugitive Telemetry here!