a prayer for the crown shy by becky chambers

The result is a lightly drawn but profound meditation on belief, entropy, and the nature of need and want that once again demonstrates Chambers’s prowess as both a storyteller and a thinker.

Built in the wild by other robots, Mosscap had never met a human before Dex and is determined to answer the question, “What do humans need?” As Dex and Mosscap navigate their new celebrity status and set out to encounter the full breadth of humanity through Panga’s varied human settlements, the question proves more complicated than either anticipated.

Dex returns from their sojourn into the dangerous wilderness of the Antlers, with Mosscap-the first robot to reach out to humans in the centuries since the Awakening, when robots gained sentience and went off to form their own autonomous societies-in tow. Moderated by Moiya McTier, astronomer-folklorist and host of the Exolore podcast, the panel will feature Hugo Award-winners Becky Chambers, Mary Robinette Kowal, and John Scalzi, as well as Doctor Who writer Simon Guerrier. The panel will conclude with a moderated Q&A with the audience and the panel members.Tea monk Sibling Dex and robot Splendid Speckled Mosscap are back for the quietly brilliant second installment in Hugo Award winner Chambers’s Monk and Robot novella series (after A Psalm for the Wild Built). Where do they take ideas from reality? Where do they choose to deviate from reality, and why? When does story trump science? What are the hardest and easiest parts of a brand new world for them to imagine? And finally, what responsibility do writers have when it comes to the public's science literacy? Join us for a panel of pre-eminent science fiction authors famous for their vivid imaginings of fantastical, fictional worlds as they describe their favorite fictional world, and then discuss the process of inventing a new world. How do science fiction authors create their fantastical new worlds? How are they impacted by the latest scientific discoveries about exoplanets (planets outside of our solar system)? A free webinar, hosted by the Keck Institute for Space Studies.

A prayer for the crown shy by becky chambers