Moonbound

Last night I finished Moonbound, Robin Sloan’s latest novel, and now I am deeply, thoroughly annoyed that there aren’t seven of them lined up already for me to blitz through. I demand EarthBound, SeaBound, SpaceBound! This is the kind of novel series where you want to step inside and never let go, spending whole weeks and months in the Bound-verse, turning over every rock, reading every new book back to back without pause.

That is to say: Moonbound is fantastic.

Here’s some quick and random notes about everything that I loved (without spoilers!):

  • I adored the villains. Lots of bad guys are genuinely boring to me in movies and novels and so I prefer when I agree with the villain and can understand their motivations. Here, the many villains of Moonbound are not plain-ol’-boring-straight-up-evil-dudes—instead, they’re scary and cool and you want to sit down with them and ask them questions and buy them a beer to understand more about how they see the world but also do all of that with them safely behind an impenetrable wall of glass.
  • There’s a twist that made me genuinely gasp! I did not expect something in a novel before it happened! This is possible to do! I am alive! Literature happened to me! It was a moment that was totally unexpected and it built up to the reveal perfectly in that sort of bubbly, novel-feeling way where unexpected things still feel possible at every turn.
  • There’s a place in the novel that I won’t spoil anything about besides the name: it’s called the Eigengrau. And, quite frankly, it’s one of my favorite fictive locations since Hannu Rajaniemi’s Summerland. As soon as I stepped foot in the Eigengrau I was hooked.
  • Sloan’s mix of magic and technology, sci-fi and fantasy, is fascinating and a bit scary in a Jeff VanderMeer way—with vague, difficult-to-grasp horrors—but also technology that’s genuinely hopeful in there, too. In fact, Dan Bouk mentioned this in his newsletter a while back: “The world gives us so many reasons to be jaded and suspicious---so many very good reasons!---and yet Robin insists that good things are still possible”
  • Moonbound insists on this, too.