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:    June 2024