Pluralistic: Robin Sloan's "Moonbound" (11 Jun 2024)

doctorow · 2024-06-11T13:19:15.591Z

Originally published at: Pluralistic: Robin Sloan’s “Moonbound” (11 Jun 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

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Robin Sloan's "Moonbound": A solarpunk road-trip novel set 11,000 years in the future.
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The Farrar, Strauss and Giroux cover for Robin Sloan's novel 'Moonbound.' It depicts a stylized, spherical Earth under a red sky that has been torn open to reveal the black universe, the moon, and the twinkling stars beyond.

Robin Sloan's "Moonbound" (permalink)

Robin Sloan has a well-deserved reputation as a sparkly, fizzy writer, the kind of person who can tell a smart/smartass story infused with fantasy-genre whimsy but grounded in high-tech, contemporary settings (think here of Charlie Jane Anders' gorgeous All the Birds In the Sky):

https://memex.craphound.com/2016/01/26/charlie-jane-anderss-all-the-birds-in-the-sky-smartass-soulful-novel/

In Moonbound, a new, wildly ambitious solarpunk novel published today by Farrar, Strauss and Girooux, Sloan moves out of his usual, daffy, high-tech/high-weird Bay Area milieu and catapults us 11,000 years into the future, to a world utterly transformed and utterly fascinating:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374610609/moonbound

Moonbound's protagonist is a "chronicler," a symbiotic fungus engineered to nestle in a human's nervous system, where it serves as a kind of recording angel, storing up the memories, experiences and personalities of its host. When we meet the chronicler, it has just made a successful leap from its old host – a 10,000-years-dead warrior who had been preserved in an anaerobic crashpod ever since her ship was shot out of the sky – into the body of Ariel, a 12-year-old boy who had just invaded the long-lost tomb.

This is quite a move. This long-dormant, intelligent fungus originates a thousand years into our own future, long after the climate emergency had been (miraculously, joyously) averted and has arrived in a world ten millennia years even further down the line. It must orient itself from its position inside the nervous system of a 12-year-old, and we have to orient ourselves to having an 11,000-year-distant future explained by an intelligent fungus from 1,000 years into our own future.

This is doing fiction in hard mode, and Sloan nails it. The unraveling strangeness of Ariel's world is counterpointed with the amazing tale of the world the chronicler hails from, even as the chonicler consults with the preserved personalities of the heroes and warriors it had previous resided in and recorded.

And in this curious way, we learn of the history of the chronicler's world, and of the strange world so far into the future that Ariel lives in – and becomes incredible consequential to.

Start with the chronicler's world: on the way to solving the climate emergency, the human race figured out how to cooperate on unimaginably massive projects (for example, addressing the world's runaway carbon problem). This pays huge dividends, ushering in a period of thrilling innovation, as humans and the nonhuman intelligences they have constructed collaborate to explore out planet, our solar system, and – thanks to a faster-than-light breakthrough – our galaxy.

A crew of seven are dispatched to the ends of space with great fanfare – but when they return, they are terrified and full of grim purpose. Something they met out there in the galaxy has convinced them that humanity must never look to the stars again. They blanket the planet in a cloak of dust and establish a garrison on the moon from which they destroy any attempts to leave the Earth.

This triggers a savage war against these seven "dragons" and their moonbase. The chronicler's warrior – the one who was entombed for 10,000 years before being discovered by Ariel – was shot down on a last-ditch attempt to destroy the dragons and their base on the moon.

Flash forward 10,000 years. Ariel lives in a weird, medieval-type village, albeit one in which the peasant-types all wear high-tech performance all-weather gear…and the animals all talk. It's a very strange place – there's a sword in a stone, a wizard in a tower…and an airstrip.

Even as the chronicler is trying to make sense of this anachronistic muddle, Ariel is marching towards his destiny. In short order, he finds himself in fear for his life, and then – for the first time in his life or the life of any other villager – Ariel leaves the village.

This kicks off the road-trip part of the novel, a real bildungsroman that sees Ariel, the chronicler, and a whole Wizard-of-Oz's worth of road pals (including a rusty tin-man type robot who is part of a hive mind of thousands of other robots all over the world; oh and a talking beaver) (oh, and a dead guy) (and there's an elk with a symbiotic beehive in its antlers that dribbles a stead stream of honey down its muzzle).

My editor Patrick Nielsen once articulated a theory of how science fiction works: you have the world, which is a kind of grand thought experiment, and you have a protagonist, who is a kind of microcosm of that world. Think of the world as this big, heavy gear, and the character as a much-faster-spinning gear that meshes with the world, spinning and spinning, pushing the world inchingly around a full revolution:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/26/aislands/#dead-ringers

The chronicler is a perfect microcosm of this strange world, where dozens of great civilizations have arisen and fallen – the ruins of a great society of hyperintelligent rats turns out to be very useful on one part of Ariel's quest – and where the dragons brood overall, a menace in the sky that the Earth's inhabitants have all but forgotten, but whom the chronicler can't ignore.

Sloan is really having a lot of fun with his talking animals; his transdimensional gods; his space-maddened, murderous lunar AIs. On the way, he's doing all kinds of really cool tricks – like asking us to really sit with the idea of giving moral consideration to the nonhuman world, including "beings" we currently think of as inanimate objects. This is a great riff:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/07/more-than-human/#umwelt

Sloan's debut novel, Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, mixed the tropes and sensibilities of tech culture with a beautiful, escapist fantasy, a "curious little magic shop" tale that was absolutely delightful:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/11/16/mr-penumbras-24-hour-bookstore-the-perfect-nerdish-fantasy/

And with Sourdough, Sloan's second book, he took that same fascination with the numinous (and with nerdy, obsessive hobbies) to the microscopic plane, with a tale of microorganisms and mystery:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/09/05/sourdough-a-delicious-story-about-nerdism-and-the-flesh-by-robin-mr-penumbra-sloan/

Moonbound delivers Sloan's third – and best! – fusion of fantasy and science fiction, delving deep into the meaning of personhood, language and moral agency with a road-trip story that visits a dazzling collection of wildly imaginative settings and societies in an epic quest to slay the dragons on the moon.

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CZM Book Club: "Party Discipline" by Cory Doctorow, Part One https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-cool-people-who-did-cool-96003360/episode/czm-book-club-party-discipline-by-183980124/
Step to write software by human https://mamot.fr/@ploum/112591341366625479
Monopoly Round-Up: The Harvey Weinstein of Antitrust https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-the-harvey-weinstein

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This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago Kill a stupid Internet patent https://web.archive.org/web/20040612095150/https://www.eff.org/patent/contest/

#15yrsago Stiglitz: America’s double-standard on economic crises infuriates the poor world https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2009/07/third-world-debt200907

#15yrsago Chinese censorware will expose every PC in the nation to malware, ID theft, botnetting https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2009/06/11/chinas-new-mandatory-censorware-creates-big-security-flaws/

#15yrsago Eliot Spitzer explains himself https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2009/07/out-to-lunch-spitzer200907

#15yrsago Network neutrality advocated by…cable operators? https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/06/cable-group-turns-net-neutrality-around-over-isp-access-fees/

#15yrsago Econoblogger explains why Batman villains shouldn’t cooperate https://eco-comics.blogspot.com/2009/06/should-batman-villains-betray-each_2173.html

#10yrsago Armed, masked Russian separatists seize “decadent” hackspace in Donetsk, Ukraine https://www.euronews.com/2014/06/10/in-donetsk-armed-pro-russian-separatists-target-seize-decadent-cultural-centre-

#10yrsago Pensacola newspaper editorial board condemns censorship of Little Brother https://www.pnj.com/story/opinion/editorials/2014/06/11/fear-books/10295745/

#10yrsago Rarity versus the Internet https://medium.com/message/you-need-to-hear-this-extremely-rare-recording-27619411e077

#10yrsago Big Cable fronts fake anti-Net-Neutrality group whose “members” never joined https://www.vice.com/en/article/4w747j/community-groups-were-duped-into-joining-telecom-industrys-anti-net-neutrality-coalition

#10yrsago Join the Fastlane: hypothetical ISP from the cable company fuckery dystopia https://web.archive.org/web/20140614100545/http://jointhefastlane.com/

#10yrsago Happynomics versus econobollocks https://timharford.com/2014/06/the-four-lessons-of-happynomics/

#10yrsago Dada vs Hitler: the anti-Nazi collages of John Heartfield https://web.archive.org/web/20140530122539/http://www.kuriositas.com/2011/06/extraordinary-anti-nazi-photomontages.html

#5yrsago The Church of the Subgenius’s Salvation Pack is the best $35 I ever spent https://memex.craphound.com/2019/06/11/the-church-of-the-subgeniuss-salvation-pack-is-the-best-35-i-ever-spent/

#5yrsago Countries with longer copyright terms have access to fewer books (pay attention, Canada!) https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3401684

#5yrsago Hackers stole a US Customs and Border Patrol facial recognition database https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/10/us-customs-border-protection-says-photos-travelers-into-out-country-were-recently-taken-data-breach/

#5yrsago Chrome-derived browsers threaten to fork from Google, refuse to eliminate ad-blocker features https://www.zdnet.com/article/opera-brave-vivaldi-to-ignore-chromes-anti-ad-blocker-changes-despite-shared-codebase/

#5yrsago Detroit charter school salutatorians use their graduation speeches to condemn their school for putting profits before kids https://www.freep.com/story/news/education/2019/06/10/salutatorians-criticize-charter-school-graduation/1381474001/

#5yrsago How fanfic archives lead the world in data organization https://www.wired.com/story/archive-of-our-own-fans-better-than-tech-organizing-information/

#5yrsago The Grand Dark: Richard Kadrey’s headlong rush of noir dieselpunk, so fast and so smart https://memex.craphound.com/2019/06/11/the-grand-dark-richard-kadreys-headlong-rush-of-noir-dieselpunk-so-fast-and-so-smart/

#5yrsago “The Grand Dark”: Kadrey’s latest is a noir, dieselpunk masterpiece that’s timely as hell https://web.archive.org/web/20190612041736/https://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-review-richard-kadrey-grand-dark-20190611-story.html

#1yrago The Shitty Tech Adoption Curve Has a Business Model https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/11/the-shitty-tech-adoption-curve-has-a-business-model/

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Locus Awards keynote (Oakland), Jun 20
https://locusmag.com/2024-locus-awards-weekend/
HOPE XV, Jul 14 (Queens, NY)
https://www.hope.net/talks.html
American Association of Law Libraries keynote (Chicago), Jul 21
https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/

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Recent appearances (permalink)

Capitalist Realism vs. Science Fiction
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz-iHWzqGK0
All Tech is Human
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKThzsYGjEQ
RISD Debates in AI keynote:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdSEcmplaDs

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Latest books (permalink)

The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
"How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
"Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

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Upcoming books (permalink)

Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025
Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Today's progress: 750 words (8883 words total).
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025
Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM
Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

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system · 2024-06-26T13:20:03.449Z

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