Moonbound

A Novel

By: Robin Sloan

Narrated by: Gabra Zackman

Long-listed, Audible.com Best of the Year, 2024

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.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

©2024 Robin Sloan (P)2024 Macmillan Audio

favorite book of 2024

how many science fiction books would you say are genuinely hopeful? I would say this one was.

Great world building but ...

Beneath some very elaborate and creative world building, this is your basic young wizard coming of age story. And there's no clear denomment. This reads more like the first half of a book rather than the first book in a series.

This book is my new obsession

To keep it succinct, my review of this should read "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"

This would be accurate, but not useful. The book is the opposite: useful but not accurate. Which is why I love it.

This is post climate emergency fiction married to Arthurian metatext dancing with enormous space opera barely glimpsed in the tear of the veil of dust around earth, making saucy eyes at eldritch horrors of our own design, obeying our own ineluctable rules of narrative. Itt is a carneval of the weird (and the wyrd), laugh out loud funny in the least explainable manner, it ping pong a between weighty myth-making language and snarky almost post modernism flavored inappropriate and yet so appropriate Twitterisms. It does so rarely, which makes it slap more.

I love this. I will read it again. It will live in my brain forever, like a friendly symbiotic yeast starter in a mech suit.

Tenuous and hard to understand.

The further I progressed in this book the more confused I was. Initially I thought it was a retelling of The Sword in the Stone or some aspect of The Canterbury Tales. I was happy with that and then it changed and I didn't know if I was part of a VR game. My impression was that the idea was hatched in a fever dream. I have read all of the author's books and this is the first one I have not raved about. I did not enjoy the story but I appreciate it.

This is the real stuff

Robin Sloan has reached a new level. The voice actor is great, clearly representing multiple characters.