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Live on Crowdcast! Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built, in conversation with Ryka Aoki, Light From Uncommon Stars
August 18, 2021 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
FreeBooks Around the Corner is thrilled to welcome Becky Chambers—author of the Hugo Award-winning Wayfarers novels—for the release of the first book in her new Monk & Robot series, A Psalm for the Wild-Built. She will be joined in conversation by Ryka Aoki, the author of the Light From Uncommon Stars which will be released September 28th.
About A Psalm for the Wild-Built. . .
Hugo Award-winner Becky Chambers’s delightful new series gives us hope for the future. It’s been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; centuries since they wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again; centuries since they faded into myth and urban legend. One day, the life of a tea monk is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until the question of “what do people need?” is answered. But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how. They’re going to need to ask it a lot. Becky Chambers’s new series asks: in a world where people have what they want, does having more matter?
Becky Chambers is a science fiction author based in Northern California. She is best known for her Hugo Award-winning Wayfarers series. Her books have also been nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Locus Award, and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, among others. She has two new works coming out in 2021: The Galaxy, and The Ground Within (the fourth and final Wayfarers novel), and A Psalm for the Wild-Built (the first of her Monk and Robot novellas). Becky has a background in performing arts, and grew up in a family heavily involved in space science. She spends her free time playing video games, tabletop RPGs, and looking through her telescope. Having hopped around the world a bit, she’s now back in her home state, where she lives with her wife. She hopes to see Earth from orbit one day.
About Light from Uncommon Stars…
This lyrical, delightful, queer SF novel is Good Omens with a Faustian bargain. Shizuka Satomi is a brilliant, cursed violinist who must win her soul back from damnation. To do this, she must take seven prodigies as students, then entice each to trade their soul for fame. She has already delivered six. However, rather than the usual pampered genius, the seventh, Katrina Nguyen, is a young transgender runaway with a wild talent, who is fleeing an abusive home. Meanwhile, Lan Tran, a starship captain, has crossed the galaxy with her family to make a new life running a local donut shop. But though she saved them from a galactic war, nothing can stop the end of existence itself. Faustian bargain meets space opera in this genre-bending novel of three vastly different women. Bombarded by catastrophe, misunderstanding, and fate, each has come to San Gabriel Valley, just outside of Los Angeles, to escape their fates, find their voices, and save the universe.
Ryka Aoki is a poet, composer, teacher, and novelist whose books include He Mele a Hilo and two Lambda Award finalists, Seasonal Velocities and Why Dust Shall Never Settle Upon This Soul. Ryka’s work has appeared or been recognized in publications including Vogue, Elle, Bustle, Autostraddle, PopSugar, and Buzzfeed. Her poetry was featured at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, and she was honored by the California State Senate for “extraordinary commitment to the visibility and well-being of Transgender people.”
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