Review: Moonbound

Moonbound by Robin Sloan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I remarked of the author's previous book, Sourdough , "Someday Robin Sloan will write a perfect book. This isn't it." I'd like to repeat that sentiment regarding Moonbound, but switch "will write" to "may write"; for me, this one is slightly further from perfection than his earlier work, mainly because it lacks the central narrative drive of a mystery or constant pursuit of a specific goal. It also turned out to be post-apocalyptic, which isn't a genre I enjoy, and that probably impacted my evaluation. As well as that, I felt that the worldbuilding was in a fight between what was likely and what fitted the feel the author was going for, and that there were missed opportunities for deeper meaning and significance overall.

Of the author's previous novels, the lesser-known Annabel Scheme is definitely science fiction, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore is marginally science-fictional at best, and Sourdough is mostly only science-fictional inasmuch as San Francisco is inherently science-fictional (it's there in the abbreviation), though both of those last two are set in a milieu where technology and its impact are important, and Sourdough does have a mystical element. This book looks at first like a high-concept far-future SF novel, set 11,000 (actually closer to 12,000) years in the future, though as it went on I felt it was more like a fantasy novel with an SF excuse; there are talking animals, quests, wizards (so called; they're genetic-manipulation wizards, but they also feel like fantasy wizards), seven-league boots, and entities called dragons.

The background is that a future version of our civilization, known, for unexplained reasons, at its height as the Anth, has been destroyed by its own creations, the "dragons." These were AIs sent out to explore via an experimental FTL technology who came back changed, took over the moon, defeated the Anth in a war, cloaked the Earth in a screen of particles, and forbade the use of radio. To me, that obviously implies that they'd found something out there that was a huge threat and didn't want broadcasts drawing its attention, but nobody in the book seems to tumble to this (or, at least, to say it out loud that straightforwardly), and the dragons don't seem to have offered this explanation; they just came out swinging. One of them implies that the threat is too complex to explain, but that doesn't remove the option of saying, "A complicated threat is out there, and this is how we need to hide from it." To be fair, encountering whatever it is seems to have driven some of the dragons mad.

The Anth's response to the fact that they were losing the war was to hide the human genome in the other living things of earth and (though it's not put this way) commit mass suicide, so that the dragons won't wipe the earth to get rid of the humans, but they can eventually come back. For handwavy reasons, this kills all the birds and uplifts all the mammals (hence talking animals), and apparently some other creatures (the first to become a wizard and convert/restore themselves to human form is a salamander). There have been multiple civilizations in the thousands of years since then, but when a couple of characters turn up who are, contrary to all likelihood, survivors of the Anth, they appear to have no language difficulties. That was a speed bump for me; I doubt there's a language spoken today that would be easily comprehensible to speakers from even 1100 years ago, and 11,000 years ago humans may not have had language at all - plus there's been a complete cultural break from the Anth, except via archaeology, because genome is not culture. If it had been me, I would have had the AI assistant (who jumps from the tomb of a crashed Anth pilot to Ariel, a boy-with-a-destiny who fortunately happens to find that tomb) learn the boy's language from within him and create a transmissible translation matrix of some kind to give to the other Anth person (Durga) who later joins the cast; but then, I think about language a lot.

That (unnamed) AI assistant is the narrator, and reminds me very much of the AI assistant in the author's earlier book, Annabel Scheme , except that AI observed via an earring worn by the protagonist, while this AI observes directly through the senses of the protagonist. It's a clever variation on close third person, and works well, particularly because the AI is able to bring a broader perspective to the boy's experiences that he himself could not have. It's certainly not an unbiased narration, though; the AI, a product of the Anth, melodramatically and, to my mind, inaccurately refers to the fall of the Anth as "the end of history," despite the fact that plenty has happened in the intervening 11,000 years.

The author, like the character Durga, does have an unfortunate tendency to say things for rhetorical effect that make no logical sense if you think about them. For example, a storage device is "stuffed so full of entertainment, it didn't even have room for an encyclopedia". I get the symbolism there - Durga is all about performance rather than reality - but in terms of facts it doesn't work; the whole of English Wikipedia takes roughly the same amount of storage as a single movie. They could have fitted an encyclopedia in if they wanted one. (And earlier the same device is said to hold "every book, movie and song produced by the Anth since the 19th century," which would, if remotely literal, include several encyclopedias. I'm not sure why the many fine works of pre-19th-century culture didn't make the cut, either.)

The AI assistant figures out, based on what seems to me to be inadequate evidence, that they're somewhere on the west coast of what used to be Ireland, but a west coast that's somewhat further out because the sea level has dropped substantially (due, presumably, to the filling of the sky with a screen of particles that's produced an effect like a nuclear winter). But... doesn't that mean they're in an ice age? And shouldn't Ireland, therefore, be much colder than it's depicted (it seems about the same as current temperatures)? The worldbuilding sometimes feels like a bricolage of handwaving, incompletely thought-through speculation, whimsy and geekery; there are a ton of Easter eggs, many of which I know I missed, salted through the text. It's not so obtrusively bad that I'd give it my "weak-worldbuilding" tag, which I've been using a bit lately (mostly on books that are so busy being socially conscious about a very narrow part of today's world in particular that they have no idea how worlds work in general), but it's not particularly strong, and certainly not "hard". It's not all the way towards the C.S. Lewis Space Trilogy end of things, but it's on that side of the spectrum - which, to be clear, I have no problem with as such; "soft" SF is often more humane and therefore more interesting to me. I'm just pointing out that the worldbuilding is a bit janky in places from a strict science point of view. There are other things that don't make much sense to me, too, such as the presence of electricity and electronics (excluding radio), and yet, apart from a couple of mentions of immersion blenders, little evidence of the use of electric motors - a simple and highly useful technology. People walk everywhere, and most work seems to be done by hand, which fits the mythic feel and ambiance but, as I say, doesn't make a whole lot of sense pragmatically.

The editing is mostly good, though it does need another quick pass before publication (I received a review copy from Netgalley). The author does have an idiosyncratic way with colons, sometimes using them where I would use a semicolon, a comma, an ellipsis, a dash, or no punctuation at all, but it's not wrong, exactly, just: unusual.

I enjoyed the beavers' method of arguing, where the two disputants finish up by summarizing each other's arguments in good faith, and in which they build a sculpture together (representing the argument, or its subject) which is what the community examines to make its decision. The collaborative-sculpture part is, of course, too mystical to be practical, at least for intelligent beings who aren't beavers, but I think the part where you summarize each other's arguments in a way that the other party will agree is fair is well worth adopting in the real world. I'm sure I've read about it in a book on negotiation, in fact.

What I was left with overall, though, was a sense of missed opportunities. Sourdough is, in part, a critique of Bay Area startup culture; this could have been a critique, as well as a celebration, of our culture as a whole, but because the narrator is an Anth chauvinist, the late Anth is seen as blameless and utopian, having solved all of the problems of the Middle Anth (our era). A charge of hubris against them is specifically denied. I would have liked to see this position interrogated, and more doubt cast on the narrator's reliability; more made of the risks of AI, given that it was rebel AIs that ended the Anth; and, in general, more contemplation of the human/posthuman condition. The protagonist undergoes a coming-of-age transition, and his original intended role is transformed into something finer, but that happens very much at the end of a story in which he mostly doesn't show a lot of focus or have much of a goal, apart from "don't be used in the wizard's scheme, whatever that is". The plot, inasmuch as there is one, is helped along several times by the sort of coincidence that can sometimes, just, be sold as "fate" in a more fantasy-type setting, but that doesn't really work when you've established the setting as a science-fictional one, however much it feels like fantasy. Also, there's a last-moment rescue which, while it isn't truly a deus ex machina - it's a Cavalry Rescue, which has, in retrospect, been foreshadowed - nevertheless feels like a deus ex machina because it's so perfectly timed, when the exact time that it happened was arbitrary. It does at least give Durga a moment of agency in the story that, up to that point, she was sorely lacking.

I've taken the time to critique it in detail because I think it's a good novel, but that with more work it could have been great. I know the author is capable of excellent writing; there's some of it here, at a sentence level, with observations like "Humans were always waking up from some dream, each individually, over the arc of a life, and also together, in the larger arc," and "More people dilute the poison of yourself, so it doesn't kill you," but I felt that I needed to be shown those things more and not just told them. It probably needed to be a longer book, and spend less time on the vibe and more on insight and theme and plot (and character; most of the characters are the one-trick characters of fairy tale), if it was going to feel fully successful to me.

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