RaveAncillary Review of BooksI find myself blown away by the epic sweep, emotional complexity, and intensely thoughtful socioeconomic structural building Byrne brings to her work ... one of the most intelligent SF novels I’ve come across in some time. The 31st-century sections are marked by Byrne’s clever linguistic mélange that reflects a truly multicultural society in all its complexity, and Byrne has a gift for distilling multifaceted subjects into single words and phrases ... Byrne’s worldbuilding for her future sociopolitical system of Laviaja is not laid out clumsily in long dull descriptions, but rather organically through the lived experiences of her characters; this gives the novel a very naturalistic and immersive feel for the reader. And Laviaja itself is a fascinating and elaborate social construction, in which the constantly on-the-move existence mandated of climate refugees for hundreds of years transforms into a global system of nomadic and virtually anarchist cooperative settlement contemptuous of permanent ownership and dedicated to the search for one’s passage to Xibalba. Byrne expertly delineates the nature of Laviaja, in the process showing her readers how humanity has evolved new frames of identification for itself—in gender, in sexual orientation, in its relationship to labor, in ethnic identity, in so many ways. Byrne is a beautifully transformative creator, who observes our current conditions and takes them to a logical future conclusion. She is a writer of great vision, from whom I imagine greater and greater things will come in the future.
Becky Chambers
RaveAncillary Review of BooksChambers has long proven herself a master in writing these kinds of relationships, and Psalm is yet another piece of proof of this ... Chambers’ story is not any kind of dramatic adventure, but rather a picaresque account of two very different forms of life finding connections and similarities to one another in the observations they make about life. Mosscap is fascinated by every aspect of the natural world, and in travelling together they and Dex reveal the deep complexities of their mutual existences, including a fundamental disagreement over the value of a discernible purpose in life ... Quietly, deftly, Chambers weaves in Psalm a story of friendship and discovery, an exploration of the true value of lived experience. Psalm is an optimistic and thoughtful story that we can desperately use in these pessimistic and all-too-often-thoughtless times; it’s a restful spot in the forest where we as readers can take time to just be, to contemplate our beautiful world and understand that we, too, are wonderful, no matter what. It’s a book that is not only lovely, not only sweet, but supremely necessary.
