Usually, the Anthropocene gives off dystopian vibes, conjuring up images of extreme weather, spreading forest fires, and disappearing coastlines. But Robin Sloan dismisses this vision of catastrophe in the very first paragraph of Moonbound: “Success came first! Wicked problems finally put to rest. After which the Anth (for that is what humans called their civilization at its apex) applied themselves eagerly to the extension of good health, the invention of new arts, and the speed of light.”
A golden age! Utopia! The end not just of the climate crisis but of all those pesky human-wrought social crises like food shortages and economic inequality that plague our shaky historical moment. So, what comes next? Catastrophe, of course, “a bummer so colossal that it was definitely, inarguably, easily the worst thing that had ever happened, in the whole history of Earth.”
Sloan’s first novel, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore (2012), was too quirky, not quite austere enough, to be a parable. But it did seem to have a message, namely that the art of reading and writing doesn’t disappear with digital technology; that, despite the dominance of image and screen, the written word hasn’t gone extinct but mutated, metastasized, the entire Earth flooded with code. In Penumbra, it was the very idea of a message that puzzled the book’s characters, as they enter a cross-country conspiracy that involves the history of publishing, Google, black robes, hidden chambers, sacred texts, 3D modeling, and the quest for immortality. As Clay, the book’s protagonist and first-person narrator, mumbles: it’s all very weird, though less Lovecraft, more the lovechild of Pynchon and Moorcock—postmodern conspiracy thriller with swords-and-sorcery energy. And it’s cheeky: “When I was a kid reading fantasy novels, I daydreamed about hot girl wizards. I never thought I’d actually meet one, but that’s only because I didn’t realize wizards were going to walk among us and we’d just call them Googlers.”
With Moonbound, Sloan enters unabashedly into the realm of pulp, writing far-future science fiction that’s no less invested in bookish questions. Moonbound is a dying Earth novel, with the caveat that what died was human civilization, not civilization as such—in fact, not even human civilization, because it turns out that humans were smuggled into the future to be reborn in the most unexpected forms. These humans make dragons, yes, dragons: not the fire-breathing serpents from medieval romance but general artificial intelligence (“layered intelligences cribbed from nature: the improvisation of the octopus, the sociability of the crow, the spider’s knack for strange geometry”). But if Sloan cribs his setting logic from science fantasy—Jack Vance’s Dying Earth (1950-1984); Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun (1980-1983); Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Cage of Souls (2019), and so on—it’s not to dispel the fantastic in the name of scientific rationality but to reenchant science through storytelling. Of the dragons, Sloan writes: “Of course, they [the Anth] also added themselves—their stories, most of all. Should have been more careful which stories went in there.” The stories range from Arthurian romance to pop idol tabloids, with heavy (and author-acknowledged) doses of Ursula K. Le Guin, C. S. Lewis, and Hayao Miyazaki.
Humans send the dragons on a “secret passage through time and space,” a star-hopping journey across the cosmos, but the dragons bring back neither knowledge, nor resources, only doom:
They did not transmit a treasure hoard of images from far-off stars. Instead, they tore a chunk out of the moon.
Dragon Ensamhet explained that his crew had encountered unimaginable horrors; that they would now draw a veil of dust around Earth; that the planet would forevermore hide from the cosmos. The dragons decreed there was a new law: caution, and darkness, and brutal quiet.
Their ship they landed on the moon, where they built a citadel, enormous, visible from Earth as a monstrous seven-pointed star.
Sloan never offers a physical description of the dragons, with a complicated exception that I won’t spoil. You can imagine sleek cyborg serpents, swirling swarms of nanites, or hard light shaped into wings and a tail, but the passage above signals an air of mystery, authority, and vindictiveness that would make Smaug proud. Our technologies are inextricable from our myths; our design and engineering cannot help but follow in the footsteps of our dreams, genre tropes and all. So, these dragons may or may not be dragonish in form, but they certainly do dragonish things, not least of all chastising humans for their grandiose ambitions. If the dragons are the titular moonbound creatures, ensconced in their ominous star-shaped fortress, humans become earthbound—cut off from the cosmos, banished from the stars, not just incapable of space flight but unable to see the constellations through the “veil of dust.”
Moonbound tells the tale of piercing the veil, of reentering the cosmos on wiser (or, at least, less foolhardy) footing. All that I’ve described so far is only the novel’s prologue. Across the rest of the book, there are also wizards (think guild-bound bioengineers), battles (more comical than epic), a magical academy (a cross between a yoga retreat, a library, and a sauna), and rocket ships (most of the novel takes place in the year 13777—the far future). Oh, and there are talking animals, the most important of which are the beavers; the latter have replaced humans as the Earth’s stewards, managing the planet’s ecosystems through the technology of, well, reeds: aquatic grasses woven into “a network as powerful as anything the Anth had ever engineered.”
Much of the delight in reading Moonbound comes from these rich explanatory descriptions, those moments when the strange slips into the ordinary, becoming if not natural, then at least worldly—congealing into an architecture, a geography, in which you can imagine living. There is, for example, Rath Varia, “a city of transformations!”:
A vast sprawl of structures screened everywhere by scaffolding; a city permanently under construction. Streets were ripped up, buildings knocked aside to make way for new routes, whole new theories of interconnection. Residents relocated cheerfully. Sometimes they hauled their homes with them.
What makes such a changing city work? How does it cohere amid such permanent residential revolution? Through “the recycling center,” also known as the “Matter Circus”: “If other cities in history had at their hearts financial districts or imperial palaces, Rath Varia beat its blood through this place: a vast arena of material, jumbled when it arrived but quickly sorted into neat lanes, metal and glass and stone, wire and screw and hinge.” The Matter Circus is the heart of the city because it’s also Rath Varia’s economy, a barter system in which all sorts of matter get exchanged. Moonbound is in part a novel of recycling, of remaking the world, of transforming the ruins of the past into so many possible futures. It’s quietly post-capitalist, side-stepping questions about how or whether to achieve socialism with matter-of-fact statements like “in Rath Varia, no one would ever go without food and shelter; these were always in surplus, freely given. The bathhouses were open to everyone. Beyond those essentials, any frivolities required a balance of matter.”
But what makes Sloan’s novel, as distinct from his fictional city, hang together? A boy, “[b]rave, curious, morbid, romantic.” His name is Ariel de la Sauvage, rather than Arthur, but when the reader meets him, he’s trapped in an T. H. White-ish LARP, an artificial scenario composed of not only a medieval-ish village but also a sword in a stone and an erratic wizard in a tower. The boy breaks the story when instead of pulling the sword from the stone, he discovers a crash-landed spaceship, infected or infiltrated by the novel’s narrator, a “cousin” to the dragons: an AI designed “to burrow inward, to record and preserve”:
What am I? Chronicler and counselor, tiny, curled up inside my human subject, riding along. I was invented by the Anth at the height of their powers, a gift for the greatest among them. I recorded their thoughts and deeds, at the same time offering to these subjects my knowledge of the past, which is: significant. […]
My core is a hearty fungus onto which much technology has been layered, at extraordinary expense. ‘Sourdough starter with a mech suit,’ one critic complained—but I like the description. Many times during my development, auditors wondered if I was worth it; but the dream of memory that could outlast a lifetime kept the project going.
Like every dying Earth novel, Moonbound is a meditation on memory. The Anth ruins that litter the landscape are seats of recollection, crumbling clues to past ways of life, as well as salvage material. The reeds through which the beavers monitor ecosystems are not only sensors and comms but also archives—a kind of planetary memory. And about half-way into the novel Ariel manages to break through the dust cloud that surrounds the Earth, summoning a living relic of the Anth: “a girl,” Durga, who emerges from the spaceship on which she was cryogenically preserved, like Taylor Swift stepping on to the stage, glowing with charisma, ready to slay (or like King Arthur’s return from under that mythic hill—also ready to slay), except the audience is absent because the tour was never advertised:
“I am she who sleeps in the stars, who returns to liberate the world at the appointed hour.” The girl squinted. “As told in the great myth.”
Ariel frowned. “I haven’t heard of any myth like that.”
“There is supposed to be a myth,” the girl said, “passed along while I slept.”
Memories of broken myths and the Plan Bs that scramble to fill the voids—that’s the stuff of Moonbound. The disappointment of myth doesn’t dull the rhythm of the story, however, because the narrator—the fungal “Chronicler” who’s made itself cozy in the protagonist’s brain—exists in a timeframe that encompasses not just generations or centuries but millennia, the timeframe of civilizations rising and falling. Yes, the thrust and parry of recognizable motifs and tropes, like Arthur pulling the sword from the stone, disappear; but the fragments of myth, the shards of storied memory, nevertheless come together in a tale that still shakes the world up. The scale of events is still epic—by the close the novel, the actions of Ariel have ensured that things won’t be the same—but the text’s tone is quirky and whimsical, as befits a novel in which beavers debate policy through competitive basket-weaving and an “unhinged” sword with the grandiose name of “Regret Minimization” lusts after the blood of its wielder’s enemies.
Moonbound is in this way boyish. It has the charm of White’s The Sword in the Stone (1938), or the Disney adaptation of it (1963), letting its main character, Ariel, grow through his mistakes without ever requiring that he harden into a superhuman force. The novel channels the chumminess of a certain stripe of British school story and the camaraderie of the Round Table itself (when the knights weren’t getting stabby with one another); it suggests the possibility of a disarming masculinity more invested in curiosity and transformation than in rightness or power.
For example, most of Moonbound is picaresque in structure, narrating Ariel’s adventures not as if they were building towards some grand culminating moment (though there is that moment) but as if they are the doings of a kid—a youngster—drifting through the world as he figures things out. This could all be frustrating were it not communicated with such affection: “I was lucky to meet someone curious, morbid, romantic, and, above all, brave,” reflects the Chronicler. Ariel becomes wiser, learns from his stumbles, but he never loses the awe and wonder he feels in the face of the new and strange. He is, above all, curious, so that the broken myths and the heavy memories of former civilizations buoy his wanderings instead of weighing him down.
This sort of lightness—this boyishness—is a welcome counterpoint to the understandably more dismal dreamings of so much contemporary speculative fiction, especially climate fiction. (It’s the opposite of, say, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife [2015] or The Windup Girl [2009].) Sloan asks what hope for the future might look like not in place of catastrophe but in its midst. What might it look like to wonder at the ruins? To adventure in the Anthropocene? Of course, there’s a danger to this kind of optimism and I worry about the way in which this boyishness dovetails with Silicon Valley’s faith in boy geniuses and the ability of technology to save humanity from itself: what if Steve Jobs were a wizard, a quest-giving, robe-wearing, staff-wielding spell-caster of the highest order; Gandalf in a turtleneck? Sloan has a fondness for the mythic California—the California of programming gurus, New Age spirituality, and all-you-can-drink sunshine—that I don’t really share, even as I appreciate the MacBook Air on which I’m typing this review.
Apple might object, but I’m almost certain Steve Jobs wasn’t a wizard. They say magic happens in Silicon Valley: it’s not just a digital mecca. It’s the future, or at least where the future gets coded. But Jobs was just a smart guy in a turtleneck hawking a slick vision of the future, another broken myth. Yet the lesson of Moonbound is that we can still dream with broken myths, that we can recycle legends, discarding their worn-out heroics and epic pretensions, turning them into the stuff of futures that are no less wondrous for having been chastened by catastrophe.