Read: Oct/Nov 2024
And the Wild Hunt rolled on. All of this unfolded without the involvement of any humans, who had dispersed as totally as a drop of dye in a tube of water. A long time passed. The Wild Hunt ended, and the world found its way into new equilibria. Civilizations rose and fell, on two legs, and four, and eight. Slowly, quietly, beneath the surface of it all - under the skin of all the animals - whether by chance, or through the nudging instruction of Tyger, Tyger’s technology - bits of humanity found themselves.
After sleeping beneath the oat, Ariel rose at first light. He crested the hill, felt the contour flatten beneath him. On the other side, the landscape rolled down into a broad forest of aspen trees, tall and straight, close packed. The view was astonishing: a uniform carpet of gold unrolled to the horizon. Ariel had never seen anything like it. I had never seen anything like it. The trees had dropped some of their leaves, but many remained; so there was gold above, and gold below. Everything was gold beneath the dusty pink sky.
I liked it and would recommend it. Though I really wanted to LOVE this book, being a fan of both Robin Sloan and some of his other books (e.g. I really loved Sourdough). And while Moonbound had many nice elements, it didn’t quite add up to the book that I exptected/had hoped for. There were too many ideas in it that then didn’t get properly developed. I’m not saying every novel should be a trilogy, or that it’s not ok to hint at things in the world that are not properly explained. But it felt like there were just a few too many ideas and beginnings of side stories that then got dropped.
Especially the end felt totally rushed and I was confused why (spoilers) they were suddenly in the spaceship - the moon - with the dragons - on a glacier. It all happened within a few pages and I can’t even remember how it all was actually resolved. On the other hand there was a long scene, which I loved, that took place in the beaver village and had a really nice exploration of an alternative way of holding debates. So I would say the pacing was off at times.
There’s also this whole thing about a font that Robin Sloan invited just for this novel, which looks really cool and shows up in a few places, but is in the end quite inconsequential and not really used. Which is a shame. I had hopes for some riddle, some big reveal, something that incorporated the script more than he had in the end.
Another thing that bothered me slightly afterwards was that I learned that he had used some (self-made?) LLMs to help with writing or idea creation. To be fair, it was just before the whole AI craze took off properly, but anything that sells me AI-created content nowadays immediately puts me off. So now when thinking about this novel, I’m digging in my mind what in the book was written by AI, and if it was passages that I really like. The whole reading experience feels cheapened now and I feel somehow cheated, having perhaps had some emotional reaction to something I thought was written by a human and instead was just pasted together by an LLM.
Though I can understand why exactly this book used a bit of AI. The whole story of the human civilisation evolving is based on some AI-like creation. The narrator is basically a (mycelial) AI. So it fits kind of.