"If we want change, or good fortune, or solace, we have to create it for ourselves."
- "What do humans need?"'
Centuries ago, the robots of Panga achieved sentience and retreated to the wilderness, promising to "check back in." Now, that promise is being fulfilled, to the surprise of a restless Tea Monk named Sibling Dex, when their unplanned wilderness excursion is interrupted by a robot with a question: what do people need?
Monk & Robot is a duology by Becky Chambers, consisting of A Psalm for the Wild-Built (2021) and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (2022).
Tropes:
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Averted. Some centuries earlier, all robots gained sentience and left the factories where they worked in favour of lives in the wild, but with a promise to someday "check in." The fulfillment of this promise drives the story.
- Ambiguous Gender: Discussed. Sibling Dex is non-binary and uses "they/them" pronouns. Mosscap, being a robot, has no gender and uses "it" as it does not separate itself from other machines, and is somewhat confused by Dex's insistence on them.Dex: Do you have a gender?
Mosscap: No.
Dex: Me neither. - The Anti-Nihilist: Mosscap. It thinks life is incredible and should be cherished because it's pointless and random, and approaches every day with joy and curiosity.
- Alien Sky: Panga is the moon of what seems to be a gas giant, which is visible in Panga's sky during certain orbital periods.
- Arc Words: "What do you need?"
- Ban on A.I.: Panga goes quite a bit beyond that in its robotics laws, as they still don't know what made the robots sapient in the first place. They don't want to accidentally make people again, or worse, make people that are incapable of communicating that they are people and enslave them.
- The Bartender: Dex's purpose as a Tea Monk is to offer tea and a listening ear to troubled people. The trope is followed in everything but the choice of beverage.
- Calming Tea: Dex's job as a tea monk is to offer this. The turning point in the first book is them letting Mosscap make them a cup instead.
- Capitalism Is Bad: The Factory Age of constant production and growth nearly wrecked the moon, and modern society is set up to specifically avoid going back to capitalism. In particular, Dex vehemently rejects the concept of money, or the idea that "pebs" are the same as currency.
- Constantly Curious: Mosscap is always asking questions and wanting to poke around new settings, which sometimes exasperates Dex.
- Desperately Seeking A Purpose In Life:
- Sibling Dex left their previous vocation two years prior to become a tea monk. After becoming highly regarded in this endeavour, they have become jaded and restless, despite the fulfilling and social nature of the work. Dex meets Mosscap after venturing out into the Wilderness to seek cloud crickets, just because.
- More broadly, when Mosscap gets to ask a wider audience what people need, the answers are either mundane and specific ("my bicycle needs repairing"), or are about needing a purpose.
- Did You Just Have Sex?: Mosscap greets Dex the morning after their hookup with a hearty, "congratulations on having sex!"
- Earth That Used to Be Better: Variation as Panga is another world similar to Earth. It is also an example of a world that's come back from the brink, an event known as "The Transition." However, there are still problems hailing from a period of heavy, destructive industrialisation known as The Factory Age. One of these problems, mass extinctions, triggers the plot as Sibling Dex heads for a distant hermitage to find out if the cloud cricket still exists.
- Fantasy Pantheon: Pangan citizens worship a pantheon of six "gods around," three "parent gods" and their three "child gods." An early section of A Psalm for the Wild-Built discusses which of these gods is responsible for robots, without reaching a firm answer.
- Trikilli, of the Threads
- Grylom, of the Inanimate
- Bosh, of the Cycle
- Chal, of Constructs
- Samafar, of Mysteries
- Allalae, of Small Comforts. Sibling Dex is a follower of Allalae.
- First-World Problems: Discussed. Dex is well aware that they have, by any objective metric, a great life; they're popular, successful, have a loving family, and want for nothing. But they have a sense of dissatisfaction and gloom that they can't quite shake. They feel deeply guilty for feeling this way, since they have no "reason" to be sad.
- Gleeful and Grumpy Pairing: The cheerful, Constantly Curious Mosscap and the exhausted, snarky Dex.
- Gut Feeling: "Remnants," which Mosscap (and presumably, other robots) sometimes has. It explains that while it has no memories of its parts' past lives, it sometimes gets an odd sense of deja vu, often in the form of fearing something it has never encountered before—for example, getting nervous around water for no apparent reason likely means one of its parts was once part of a robot that had a bad experience with water.
- Innocently Insensitive: Mosscap can be overbearing and sometimes displays a poor sense of personal boundaries, but it's hard to be offended, since it's clearly well-meaning and is a total Fish out of Water.
- Instant A.I.: Just Add Water!: About five hundred years ago, robots suddenly became sapient with no indication as to what triggered it, and they left for the wilds so they could discover themselves without being influenced by humans. Mosscap later reveals not even the robots have figured out why it happened, comparing it to a human not instinctively knowing what their spleen does.
- "It" Is Dehumanizing: Averted and discussed. Mosscap insists on the pronoun "it," as it is an object and not a person. Dex wonders if this isn't insulting, but Mosscap says it's only insulting if people view being an "it" as less-than.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Dex is sarcastic, jaded, and impatient, but a kind and caring person who takes their work as a Tea Monk and their duty to help people extremely seriously.
- Line-of-Sight Name: Robots take a name based on the first thing they see after their creation. This is why Mosscap and all its compatriots have nature-based names.
- Nature-Loving Robot: All robots. They can spend years watching a single plant grow, remake themselves regularly to follow nature's cycles, and all have names pulled from nature. Mosscap's full name is Splendid Speckled Mosscap.
- Nice Guy: Mosscap—well, Nice Robot, since it has no gender. It's cheery, friendly, compassionate, and eager to help however it can.
- Non-Human Non-Binary: Mosscap specifically says it has no gender, though it never clarifies whether other robots do.
- Platonic Life-Partners: The beating heart of the duology is the bond formed by the titular monk and robot. Despite a somewhat bumpy start, the two gradually become close as family, and travel together as a unit in search of what it is people need.
- Reclaimed by Nature: Part of "the Transition" was stripping out anything toxic and leaving large amounts of the moon to rewild itself. Dex's quest in the first book is to find a hermitage that was abandoned long ago and see if there are any cloud crickets left.
- Riddle for the Ages: Why did all the robots wake up one day? Even they have no idea. The epigraph for the first book is a segment of an in-universe text on the debate, explaining that most people think one of the gods is responsible, but can't agree upon which god did it or why.
- Scavenged Punk: The town on the water, where the inhabitants strain junk from the Factory Age out of the river and reinvent it into something new, leading to an very eclectic town. Dex visits one when Mosscap needs repairs.
- Solar Punk: Sometime ago, the humans of Panga went through the Transition from the Factory Age. Now all energy is renewable, everything is recyclable, the economy system of "pebs" ensures No Poverty, and large amounts of the planet have been left to return to nature. The Arc Words of the series are about humans and robots figuring out what's next after they've effectively created a utopia.
- Treetop Town: The first town that Mosscap and Dex visit together, although there are some houses on the ground too.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Discussed. Mosscap insists that, as a robot, it is an object and not a person. However, being an object does not demean its importance. In contrast, being treated as an "honorary person" is offensive, as it implies that only people are valid.
- Who Wants to Live Forever?: Robotkind as a whole has elected not to be immortal, even though they theoretically could; while their parts do break down eventually, there's nothing stopping them from simply repairing themselves. However, they concluded that, since all other things in the world have a lifespan that one day ends, they should follow suit. Instead, they let themselves break down when it's time, and then the parts of several "dead" robots are rebuilt into a new one—Mosscap itself is made up of at least three others. The new robot has a different personality and no memories of its past life, although they can sometimes get a sense for what their old parts may have gone through based on Gut Feelings.
- The World Is Just Awesome: A major recurring theme in Dex and Mosscap's wanderings, especially for Mosscap. In A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, Dex is bemused how Mosscap can spend so much time photographing near-identical tree branches, while Mosscap wonders how Dex can not. However, Dex is entranced by the "crown-shyness" of a nearby stand of trees when Mosscap points it out; the uppermost branches of separate trees stop growing just short of each other, unfailingly leaving a gap despite the apparent lack of sensory organs that should make this possible.
- "I know that no matter what, I’m wonderful."
