India, July 19 -- Tiny excerpt: "Do you not find consciousness alone to be the most exhilarating thing? Here we are, in this incomprehensibly large universe, on this one tiny moon around this one incidental planet, and in all the time this entire scenario has existed, every component has been recycled over and over and over again. You and I-we're just atoms that arranged themselves the right way." A monk and a robot walk into a forest, on a distant moon orbiting an unnamed planet. They talk about work, fulfilment, loneliness, ambition. Becky Chambers's two-part Monk and Robot novella, featuring the Hugo Award-winning A Psalm for the Wild-Built (2021) and its sequel, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (2022), is, as she puts it in her dedication, "for anybody who could use a break". On this distant moon named Panga, AI and robots once helped humans build an industrialised society. Following a robot revolution, the machines disappeared into the wilderness. Without them, humans have switched to a life of farming, building self-sustaining villages from "mycelium masonry". In this idyllic world, a tea monk shuttles between villages, offering tea and a patient ear. But his placid smile hides a restlessness. He cannot help but wonder if there is more to life than this. In the forests, he meets a robot curious about human life. Part 2 follows the duo as they wander through human settlements, the robot asking the people they meet: "What do humans need? What do humans need?" In this hope-punk world, characters choose kindness as rebellion. But the need to challenge the system never disappears....