#moonbound by Robin Sloan

[chexala]

fave books of 2024

I didn't read as many books in 2024 as I usually do (because I got utterly derailed by Baldur's Gate 3) but of the books I did read, so many of them were absolute bangers.

So, without further ado, in no particular order, these were my favorite reads of the year, below the cut

The Ministry of Time, by Kalianne Bradley I know nothing about Arctic Exploration, I've never seen The Terror, and honestly still don't really know or care anything about any of that; I came this this one for the time-travel forced-proximity man-out-of-time romance with critiques of the Empire, and it absolutely delivered. I've read/listened to this book 3 times already.

Moonbound, by Robin Sloan Far-future post-apocalyptic epic science-fantasy like I've never seen before; this one is a fun romp with lots of humor and cheeky winks, but it also takes it's optimism seriously. And the beavers, omg, I am obsessed with the beavers.

The Fox Wife, by Yangsze Choo Historical fiction, a detective murder mystery, and magical folklore all rolled into one. Deals with heavy themes of loss with a sensitive hand, but/and the fox folk are such lively chaos gremlins, making trouble wherever they go, that the novel doesn't collapse under that weight. The author reads the audiobook beautifully.

Long Live Evil, by Sarah Rees Brennan Uuugh, so good, so fun, this one kept me on my toes. Come for the villainess isekai, stay for the full cast of morally grey, lovable idiots. (They are all treasures, and I love them.) Buckle up for a series, book two is coming sometime in 2025.

A Magical Girl Retires, by Park Seolyeon A short, dark comedy for all of us millennial girlies (gender inclusive) who are still waiting for our magical powers to kick in while trying to survive the late-capitalism hellscape. Get this one in hardcover if you like to collect pretty books!

Someone You Can Build A Nest In, by John Wiswell Do you feel like a shapeshifting people-eating blob monster, and/or would you like to date one? This one is for you. It's fantasy, it's body horror, it's romance, it's queer, it's unrelentingly gory, and also, somehow, cozy (for me anyway).

The Wild Huntress, by Emily Lloyd-Jones This is a shameless plug of a friend's work, but/and Emily is sincerely one of my favorite YA authors. Wild Huntress is the latest in her series of stand-alone Welsh-inspired fantasy novels. The stakes were high, the plotting was tight, the third act was a punch in the face, and the ending was bittersweet.

The Deep Dark, by Molly Knox Ostertag I’ve loved everything of Ostertag's that I’ve read so far, and this was no exception. Messy teens figuring out their stuff, coming of age, and embracing the whole of your self, even the parts that seem scary or bad. Such feels, A+, no notes.

Anyway, that's it. Thanks for reading!

[208tinyhorses]

"My victories were stupid!" exclaimed Mankeeper. "Who wants to kill a thing with bears for hands? You think I mean he had hands like a bear's. No. Each hand was a bear. Bears for hands. But kill him I did, and said to myself, What bad luck, Mankeeper, to be born into such an ugly age."

Moonbound by Robin Sloan

[rhetoricandlogic]

MOONBOUND by Robin Sloan

RELEASE DATE: June 11, 2024

A sentient artifact that witnessed the fall of human civilization becomes a friend and advisor to a boy who discovers it many lifetimes later.

Twelve-year-old Ariel de la Sauvage has never seen a blue sky or tasted tomato sauce. Millennia before he began life in the small, remote village of Sauvage, humanity was defeated by AI-begat “dragons” in a war to end all wars, changing the course of life on Earth forever. While exploring the valley around Sauvage, Ariel discovers an object dating back to that era: a spaceship’s escape pod, entombed in a cave revealed by the calving of a glacier. In addition to the body of human warrior Altissa Praxa, the pod holds the chronicling device that served Altissa in life, a sophisticated and self-aware apparatus designed to record human memories. (For its part, the chronicler describes itself as “a hearty fungus onto which much technology has been layered, at extraordinary expense.”) Making the leap from Altissa to Ariel, the chronicler, who acts as the book’s narrator, finds society transformed. Animals talk. Robots roam the roads. Wizards hold sway, including the Wizard Malory, the ruler of Sauvage. When Ariel inadvertently thwarts Malory’s secret plans one day, revealing an intricate conspiracy revolving around Ariel himself, he incurs the wizard’s wrath and only manages to escape Sauvage by the skin of his teeth. Pursued by Malory and his forces, Ariel is aided by a colorful cast of characters ranging from an elk to a bog body to a trash picker as he searches for a way to defeat the wizard—and figure out why Malory wants him in the first place. Thanks to the chronicler’s distinct voice and novel point of view, it makes for an ingenious choice of narrator; the plot itself is replete with thorny quests and arduous journeys in the manner of classics like A Wrinkle in Time and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, though the finale feels somewhat rushed and leaves a few questions hanging. Coming at the dawn of the AI era, this is a thoughtful (and hopefully not prescient) book that, like its characters, asks: What happens next?

An expansive adventure that blends fantasy and SF to address one of the most pressing issues of our time.

[irrational-pie]

ahhhhhhhhhHHHHHHHHHH I've read some good books this year!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Robin Sloan’s “Moonbound”

On June 20, I'm keynoting the LOCUS AWARDS in OAKLAND.

Robin Sloan has a well-deserved reputation as a sparkly, fizzy writer, the kind of person who can tell a smart/smartass story infused with fantasy-genre whimsy but grounded in high-tech, contemporary settings (think here of Charlie Jane Anders' gorgeous All the Birds In the Sky):

https://memex.craphound.com/2016/01/26/charlie-jane-anderss-all-the-birds-in-the-sky-smartass-soulful-novel/

In Moonbound, a new, wildly ambitious solarpunk novel published today by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, Sloan moves out of his usual, daffy, high-tech/high-weird Bay Area milieu and catapults us 11,000 years into the future, to a world utterly transformed and utterly fascinating:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374610609/moonbound

Moonbound's protagonist is a "chronicler," a symbiotic fungus engineered to nestle in a human's nervous system, where it serves as a kind of recording angel, storing up the memories, experiences and personalities of its host. When we meet the chronicler, it has just made a successful leap from its old host – a 10,000-years-dead warrior who had been preserved in an anaerobic crashpod ever since her ship was shot out of the sky – into the body of Ariel, a 12-year-old boy who had just invaded the long-lost tomb.

This is quite a move. This long-dormant, intelligent fungus originates a thousand years into our own future, long after the climate emergency had been (miraculously, joyously) averted and has arrived in a world ten millennia years even further down the line. It must orient itself from its position inside the nervous system of a 12-year-old, and we have to orient ourselves to having an 11,000-year-distant future explained by an intelligent fungus from 1,000 years into our own future.

This is doing fiction in hard mode, and Sloan nails it. The unraveling strangeness of Ariel's world is counterpointed with the amazing tale of the world the chronicler hails from, even as the chonicler consults with the preserved personalities of the heroes and warriors it had previous resided in and recorded.

And in this curious way, we learn of the history of the chronicler's world, and of the strange world so far into the future that Ariel lives in – and becomes incredible consequential to.

Start with the chronicler's world: on the way to solving the climate emergency, the human race figured out how to cooperate on unimaginably massive projects (for example, addressing the world's runaway carbon problem). This pays huge dividends, ushering in a period of thrilling innovation, as humans and the nonhuman intelligences they have constructed collaborate to explore out planet, our solar system, and – thanks to a faster-than-light breakthrough – our galaxy.

A crew of seven are dispatched to the ends of space with great fanfare – but when they return, they are terrified and full of grim purpose. Something they met out there in the galaxy has convinced them that humanity must never look to the stars again. They blanket the planet in a cloak of dust and establish a garrison on the moon from which they destroy any attempts to leave the Earth.

This triggers a savage war against these seven "dragons" and their moonbase. The chronicler's warrior – the one who was entombed for 10,000 years before being discovered by Ariel – was shot down on a last-ditch attempt to destroy the dragons and their base on the moon.

Flash forward 10,000 years. Ariel lives in a weird, medieval-type village, albeit one in which the peasant-types all wear high-tech performance all-weather gear…and the animals all talk. It's a very strange place – there's a sword in a stone, a wizard in a tower…and an airstrip.

Even as the chronicler is trying to make sense of this anachronistic muddle, Ariel is marching towards his destiny. In short order, he finds himself in fear for his life, and then – for the first time in his life or the life of any other villager – Ariel leaves the village.

This kicks off the road-trip part of the novel, a real bildungsroman that sees Ariel, the chronicler, and a whole Wizard-of-Oz's worth of road pals (including a rusty tin-man type robot who is part of a hive mind of thousands of other robots all over the world; oh and a talking beaver) (oh, and a dead guy) (and there's an elk with a symbiotic beehive in its antlers that dribbles a stead stream of honey down its muzzle).

My editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden once articulated a theory of how science fiction works: you have the world, which is a kind of grand thought experiment, and you have a protagonist, who is a kind of microcosm of that world. Think of the world as this big, heavy gear, and the character as a much-faster-spinning gear that meshes with the world, spinning and spinning, pushing the world inchingly around a full revolution:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/26/aislands/#dead-ringers

The chronicler is a perfect microcosm of this strange world, where dozens of great civilizations have arisen and fallen – the ruins of a great society of hyperintelligent rats turns out to be very useful on one part of Ariel's quest – and where the dragons brood overall, a menace in the sky that the Earth's inhabitants have all but forgotten, but whom the chronicler can't ignore.

Sloan is really having a lot of fun with his talking animals; his transdimensional gods; his space-maddened, murderous lunar AIs. On the way, he's doing all kinds of really cool tricks – like asking us to really sit with the idea of giving moral consideration to the nonhuman world, including "beings" we currently think of as inanimate objects. This is a great riff:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/07/more-than-human/#umwelt

Sloan's debut novel, Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, mixed the tropes and sensibilities of tech culture with a beautiful, escapist fantasy, a "curious little magic shop" tale that was absolutely delightful:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/11/16/mr-penumbras-24-hour-bookstore-the-perfect-nerdish-fantasy/

And with Sourdough, Sloan's second book, he took that same fascination with the numinous (and with nerdy, obsessive hobbies) to the microscopic plane, with a tale of microorganisms and mystery:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/09/05/sourdough-a-delicious-story-about-nerdism-and-the-flesh-by-robin-mr-penumbra-sloan/

Moonbound delivers Sloan's third – and best! – fusion of fantasy and science fiction, delving deep into the meaning of personhood, language and moral agency with a road-trip story that visits a dazzling collection of wildly imaginative settings and societies in an epic quest to slay the dragons on the moon.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/11/penumbraverse/#middle-anth

[astronaut-karenwilson]

For the end-of-year book ask meme: 3, 17, and 24! (If you don't mind me asking multiple ones, lol)

I don’t mind at all, thank you so much!! 💖 I hope you don’t mind me rambling about books a lot lol

3. What were your top five books of the year?

1. Cascade Failure & Gravity Lost by L.M. Sagas

Okay I cheated a little, but I love this new series so much!!! Space adventures! Found family! Imminent peril!! I’ve been out of the sci-fi genre for years, this was a wonderful way back in.

2. The Book Censor’s Library by Bothayna Al-Essa

Oooh, baby, let’s talk about a dystopian classic for a new generation. Fahrenheit 451, please take a seat, Book Censor’s Library is here.

3. All the Sinner’s Bleed by S.A. Cosby

I’d say I’m still new to the mystery genre, but this author is a master, and the audiobook narrator really brought everything to life.

4. A Grandmother Begins the Story by Michelle Porter

A gorgeously interwoven tale about five generations of Métis women. Slower-paced, but excellent reading during the cold winter months.

5. Moonbound by Robin Sloan

Let’s go 13,000 years into the future. Dragons live on the moon and also they ate part of it. That’s the first chapter, friends, and it just gets more wild from there.

Honorable mention to the 1981 BBC radio production of LOTR I found on Libby, but that doesn’t exactly qualify as books lol

17. Did any books surprise you with how good they were?

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

This was a slow start for me. The author does not wait for the readers, just drops you right into the world he created with a lot of new vocabulary and complicated societal structures right off the bat. But it works, because if you stick with it, the mystery that unfolds is full of exciting twists and turns.

24. Did you DNF anything? Why?

I have such a hard time DNF-ing, even when I really should. I should’ve DNF-d The Winter Knight by Jes Battis, it took me over a month to read. A queer retelling of King Arthur sounds like it should be right up my alley, but I just never fully connected with it and it was sheer force of will to get through to the end of it.

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

i put an upcoming book on hold (Robin Sloan’s MOONBOUND) bc i place holds on the barest of whims, but the most uncharitable view i could take on this WIRED profile is that it seems to be another Ready Player One??? the way the author talked about the “meta-ness” of this book … i fear i am not going to like this very much.

[shychick-52]

I have a recommendation for you as well if you’d like one! I’m currently reading Moonbound by Robin Sloan and it’s really good so far. It’s got multiple AI characters and is a delightful mix of fantasy, scifi, and kind of speculative fiction?? It also reads kind of like a fairy tale which I find very pleasant. I think you’d like it if you like Becky Chambers :)

Like you, I LOVE AI characters! Those are all genres I love! Thanks!!

[thimel]

Leseliste September 2024

Sourdough, Robin Sloan, Atlantic 2018

Moonbound, Robin Sloan, MCD 2024

The Masquerades of Spring, Ben Aaronovitch, Orion 2024