A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Monk & Robot, #1)

by Becky Chambers

A forest floor, the Woodland villagers knew, is a living thing. Vast civilizations lay within the mosaic of dirt: hymenopteran labyrinths, rodential panic rooms, life-giving airways sculpted by the traffic of worms, hopeful spiders’ hunting cabins, crash pads for nomadic beetles, trees shyly locking toes with one another. It was here that you’d find the resourcefulness of rot, the wholeness of fungi. Disturbing these lives through digging was a violence—though sometimes a needed one, as demonstrated by the birds and white skunks who brashly kicked the humus away in necessary pursuit of a full belly. Still, the human residents of this place were judicious about what constituted actual necessity, and as such, disturbed the ground as little as possible. Careful trails were cut, of course, and some objects—cisterns, power junctions, trade vehicles, and so on—had no option but to live full-bodied on the ground. But if you wanted to see the entirety of a Woodland settlement, the direction to look was up.