What Are Monk And Robot Book 3 Fan Theories About?

On my commute I sketch scenarios in the margins of my book and the three I keep jotting down for book three feel different from each other. One is a personal-growth arc for Mosscap: he finds other robots who experiment with craft — making music, weaving, tending gardens — and that challenges the simple solitude-versus-service framing we've had so far. Another is a communal ripple centered on Dex: a small human enclave faces a natural crisis and has to decide whether to ask for robotic help, which would force questions about dependency, gratitude, and reciprocity. The third is more metaphysical: fragments of pre-collapse tech surface that suggest the robots were meant to be caretakers of both people and planet, introducing an ethical mandate that some robots accept and others resist.

What I like about these theories is how they keep the series' tone — soft, curious, quietly radical — while opening into bigger stakes. They let Becky zoom out just enough to test ideas without changing the intimate pace that makes the books feel like a conversation over tea. I keep wondering which quiet possibility she'll pick, and that pleasant impatience is why I re-read parts of 'A Prayer for the Crown-Shy' whenever I need a reminder of how gentle worldbuilding can be.

Honestly, one of my favorite threads to pull on is how book three might expand the gentle orbit around Dex and Mosscap into a wider, almost mythic conversation about machine life and human desire. After 'A Psalm for the Wild-Built' and 'A Prayer for the Crown-Shy' we were given these small, intimate moments — tea, walks, long silences — but those moments carry this huge ballast of world history and unanswered questions. A big fan theory I keep circling back to is that book three will reveal a loose network of other wild-built robots who have taken different paths: some embraced solitude like Mosscap, others formed tiny communal ecosystems, and a few adopted roles that look almost religious to nearby human communities. That would let Becky explore how culture multiplies from a single example, and what it means for humans when robots start to accumulate traditions.

Another angle I'm excited about is the tension between repair and preservation. Dex's work as a monk feels repair-oriented on a personal scale; what if the next book scales that up to landscapes? Maybe human settlements beyond the tea routes are wrestling with whether to actively shape ecosystems or step back and let them heal. Mosscap encountering robots that have chosen stewardship in very different, even authoritarian, ways would create beautiful moral puzzles without falling into dystopia. I also suspect we'll see glimpses of the pre-fall tech era that created the robots — not as a cataclysmic reveal but as scattered artifacts that make both Dex and Mosscap ask new questions about purpose. I keep picturing a final scene where a new kind of question is posed to Mosscap — not about what a robot should do, but what the world might ask of both species — and that uncertainty, more than any tidy resolution, feels exactly right to me.

If I had to stitch together a few more concrete fan-theory possibilities, they break down into three favorite camps I talk about with friends at conventions and in late-night forum threads. First: Mosscap's origin gets a quiet expansion. Maybe Mosscap isn't the only prototype from a lab that wanted to make curious, gentle machines; there could be one surviving sibling with a very different philosophy, and meeting them forces Mosscap to reckon with choice versus design.

Second: Dex's journey outward. Up until now, the series has been wonderfully localized — tea houses, roads, and small towns — but book three could take Dex beyond familiar borders. I like the theory that he'll travel to a place where humans still distrust robots, and his gentle model of asking questions becomes a small seed for reconciliation. That opens room for cultural conflict, stubborn old institutions, and the slow, painful work of change.

Third: a political turn without losing the series' softness. Fan speculation I love imagines communities trying to codify relationships with wild-built robots into laws, which would compel Mosscap to decide whether to participate in human governance or remain a wanderer. That drama could let Becky examine consent, agency, and collaboration in ways that stay hopeful but honest. If you're re-reading 'A Psalm for the Wild-Built' or 'A Prayer for the Crown-Shy', watch for tiny world-details — names of places, offhand descriptions of cities — they often blow up into full-fledged theories in my head.