Introduction to Moonbound

Here is Moon­bound described by Drew Broussard over at Lit­erary Hub:

[A] joyful shout of a book about sentience, humanity, and … well, magic.

It’s set about 11000 years in the future on an Earth somehow crossed between post-human and pre-industrial Arthurian civ­i­liza­tion [ … ] with sen­tient yeast strains, beaver societies, wiz­ards pow­erful enough to stop a heart with a single word, AI dragons who’ve destroyed most of civ­i­liza­tion and built a palace on the moon, and so much more. It’s an epic novel, deeply curious about the pos­si­bil­i­ties of our future and the ethics of how we might get there, but it never loses sight of the fact that reading ought to be fun. Put this one along­side His Dark Mate­rials and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books.

Here is Moon­bound described by me:

The year is 13777. There are dragons on the moon.

Here is Moon­bound described by my editors at MCD×FSG, char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally punchy and electric:

Robin Sloan expands the Penum­bra­verse to new reaches of time and space in a rol­licking far-future adven­ture.

In Moon­bound, Robin Sloan has written a novel with the full scope and ambi­tious imag­i­na­tion of the very books that lit the engines of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore: an epic quest as only Sloan could con­ceive it, mixing sci­ence fiction, fantasy, good old-fashioned lit­erary storytelling, and unri­valed enthu­siasm for what’s next.

It is eleven thou­sand years from now … A lot has happened, and yet a lot is still very familiar. Ariel is a boy in a small town under a wizard’s rule. Like many adven­turers before him, Ariel is called to explore a world full of unimag­in­able glo­ries and challenges: unknown enemies, a mis­sion to save the world, a girl. Here, as they say, be dragons. But none of this hap­pens before Ariel comes across an arti­fact from an ear­lier civ­i­liza­tion, a sen­tient, record-keeping arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence that car­ries with it the per­spec­tive of the whole of human history — and becomes both Ariel’s greatest ally and the nar­rator of our story.

Moon­bound is an adven­ture into the richest depths of Story itself. It is a deeply sat­is­fying epic of ancient scale, blasted through the imag­i­na­tive prism one of our most forward-thinking writers. And this is only the beginning.

The evi­dence mounts: you’re better off let­ting other people describe your work.

Maybe so, but I like my version, too.

The year is 13777. There are dragons on the moon!

First published:  October 2023
Last updated: December 2024