Robot Wrangler Roy and The Silent Harvest

Some troubles can't be rebooted. They have to be understood.

Out along the Scatter, a loose chain of half-tamed worlds strung on the old trade routes, there is always a machine in trouble that nobody else knows how to help. That is where Roy comes in. He is a robot wrangler: not the man who wipes and scraps and reboots, but the one you send for when a machine has gone strange, gone quiet, or gone unwanted, and somebody has to find out why before anyone does something that can't be undone.

He works out of The Marigold, an old, faded, much-mended barge that is home to as odd and dear a found family as the frontier has ever floated. There is Bart, the gloriously gloomy robot Roy once wrangled and simply kept, who would prefer not to get his hopes up and loves them all the harder for it. There is Mungo, a big, soft, mossy-green alien whose appetite is exceeded only by his accidental wisdom. There is Pip, a fizzing young engineer-pilot who leaps a good half-second before she looks. And there is Hessa, the old alien matriarch who keeps the galley, the ledger, and the heart of the ship, and runs the lot of them sideways, by feeding them.

At Cobb's Reach, the whole fleet has stopped.

Not broken down. Stopped. Dozens of field units standing motionless in the ochre rows, unharmed, patient, every one of them turned the same way like grass leaning into a wind nobody can feel. The harvest that pays the town's debts is days from ruin, the dry season is coming on, and the weary foreman, Della Marsh, has hired a wrangler to do the obvious thing: wipe the lot and set them walking again by sundown.

But Roy knows a glitch when he sees one, and this is no glitch. A whole fleet does not sit down at once, in the same posture, in the same breath, by accident. That takes agreement. These machines have chosen their silence, and there is something they are waiting for, something the town can't see and won't like. With a master-wipe rig cabled up and warm in the works shed, a frightened town edging toward doing it the brutal, easy way, and his own crew's good hearts making things worse before they get better, Roy has only one method and one rule: listen first, and find an answer that throws no one away.

Robot Wrangler Roy and The Silent Harvest is a warm, dry-witted, quietly moving cozy science-fiction novella for adults, a comfort read in the company of Becky Chambers, Travis Baldree, and T.J. Klune. Low on peril and high on heart, gently funny, and with no on-page violence at all: a story about obsolescence and worth, about solidarity expressed as stillness rather than force, and about the radical notion that the bravest, most competent thing a person can do is slow down and hear.

Every Robot Wrangler Roy book is a complete, self-contained wrangle. Start anywhere, read them in any order, and pull up a chair at Hessa's table. You will be looked after in here.