Reading Journal 2024: The Wild Robot

Reading Journal 2024: The Wild Robot
Author: Peter Brown

Every once in a while you come across a book that makes you sad for the fact that you didn’t have a chance to read it much, much earlier in life. Bringing together the sensibilities of E.B. White and Gary Paulson, Brown imagines a story that connects their shared interest in both philosophy and nature with a sci-fi premise- what would happen if we took a robot with the capability of learning through participation in (and in relationship to) its environment, and placed it in the wild? What would it become? How would it adapt? What can it tell us about nature? About humanity?

It reaches much broader yet- what could it tell us about life? Death? Family? Love? Friendship? Our humanity?

What’s really astute and powerful about the way Brown draws this story out in his imagination is that he builds into this a connection to the cycles and developments of the natural world, including its landscape. This is deeply visual prose. As it moves through the seasons, it also moves through the land, as well as the growth and development of the robot in concert with the land and its inhabitants. The robot is observing a world he doesn’t quite fit into and understand, while at the same time she is in some sense part of it and contributing to it. The more the robot grows and adapts and develops, the more it finds itself living in a distinct relationship with this world, subverting and transcending that wildness as it seeks to reconcile a fundamental and functioning conscious awareness with the tensions it finds in the wild. This also leads to questions regarding awareness of it’s own identity as a robot. Who am I if not a wild creature?

As a young child, I think I would have really resonated with this book in the same way I did Paulsens works and E.B. White, both formative voices in my life. Reading it now transported me back to those moments, allowing me to engage impossible questions and dare myself to broaden my imagination in the face of what were probably struggles with existential concern and deeply rooted fears that reached beyond my years as a young child. Even then I was fascinated by the notion that there seemed to be a disconnect between the world I could see and experience and the world I longed for, the one that threw me into crisis and the one I could imagine and hope for. A world of nature and of spirit, however lost I felt inbeteeen these two seemingly irreconcilable forces.

The tag line for the book is, “can a robot survive in the wilderness”. At least part of the books intent is to probe the question to us: can we survive in the wilderness that is our lives, and what might that look like from the perspective of our humanity?

No question too big or too small, no person too big or too small. Set in the right story with the right words and the right characters, such questions and observations will always hold power and relevance to the places and spaces we occupy in the present.

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