Moonbound

<p>Last night I finished <a href="https://www.robinsloan.com/moonbound/">Moonbound</a>, 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.</p> <p>That is to say: Moonbound is fantastic.</p> <p>Here’s some quick and random notes about everything that I loved (without spoilers!):</p> <ul> <li>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.</li> <li>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.</li> <li>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.</li> <li>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 <a href="https://buttondown.email/danbouk/archive/friendship-moonbound-and-next-monday-in-nyc/">in his newsletter</a> 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”</li> <li>Moonbound insists on this, too.</li> </ul>