Moonbound

A Novel

By: Robin Sloan

Narrated by: Gabra Zackman

Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins

Publisher's summary

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

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.

Now one of my favorite books

It's been a while since I've had the feeling of "I hope this never ends" while coming towards the end of the book. Thankfully, it ended with the great human question: what comes next. And so I have an itch of a hope that we shall one day return and likely find out more about the storm machines.

I love books that somehow believably intermingle all the genres, science fiction and fantasy, comedy and mystery, adventure and even a hint of romance.

I love love love this book and hope to meet the author some day... probably in his beloved SF.

Story with a capital ‘S’

Moonbound has creative storytelling and language! This book books so hard, you’re gonna love it

Wow! Wow! Wow!

My mind is stretched, my heart sings, my hope restored, my soul yearns to know - What Happens Next? Thank you Robin, amazing!

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.

Outstanding

Different in style from previous Sloan novels yet still very much the same. Outstanding story telling, huge imagination, and lots of subtle questions about the nature of our world.

Entertaining fantasy

This tale takes place in a post-apocalypse world whose citizens are perfectly adapted to their reality. Just when you think the story is predictable, it takes another twist and you decide to give it a little more time. That is what I did, and loved it to the end. The narrator is amazing with such a variety of voices it is easy to follow the characters. Highly recommend.

A weird and wonderful world

Robin Sloan’s latest addition to his “Penumbraverse” is Moonbound (absolutely no knowledge of the previous books required!). Moonbound is a multi-genre fusion of myth, sci-fi, fantasy and fable, beautifully decanted into an adventurous and engaging tale. Many of my favorites can be discerned in its DNA: Arthurian myth, Narnia, the Wizard of Oz, Studio Ghibli and a big dose of Adventure Time among others, and yet its a novel that is wholly its own, with a weird and wonderful world to explore as we follow the protagonist Ariel on his quest. A parade of curious and engaging characters enlivens the journey, and Sloan’s prose is vivid and well crafted, and moves the story along without snags, using humor to great effect (as with the previous Penumbraverse novels). Sci-fi so far into the future that it bends into fantasy is a rich vein to mine, and I’m left hungry for much more of this world, with its sentient swords, fungal AI, talking animals and hyper-dimensional beings. I can see many more tales waiting around the corners and much more of this world to be mapped, and I hope Sloan has the opportunity to continue doing just that. Gabra Zackman was the perfect voice for the Chronicler, narrating the story with range and warmth.