It is, he writes me, “A novel dreamt up (in part) on the road between Capay Valley and Oregon House,” and, as his ten-year-old son Orion says, after Sloan read him the book, it’s YA (Young Adult) but something even younger children could enjoy—if they don’t mind the intensity of a post-apocalyptic world, in the year 11,377, full of talking beavers, giant flies, and dragons made up of information.
About those dragons. Back in the year 2279, the Anth (“for that is what humans called their civilization at its apex”) created seven engineered intelligences, the “dragons,” and sent them out on a spaceship. Instead of opening a door into the universe, the dragons on their return built a base on the moon, pulverized a chunk of their new home and created a dust cloud around Earth so it would “forevermore hide from the cosmos.”
The Anth tried to fight back, but most all humans were destroyed. It was “a bummer so colossal that it was definitely … the worst thing that had ever happened” in Earth’s history.
Thousands of years passed and one of the mini-intelligences, engineered by the Anth as a “Chronicler,” found itself inside a boy named Ariel, 12.
The Chronicler tells the story, about how Ariel, escaping from the Wizard Malory, who had somehow created him, finds his destiny. But Sloan, with sly humor, upends standard fantasy tropes. There’s a sword in a stone for Ariel to pull out, but he ignores it and finds a very different, talking, sword. (More details: robinsloan.com/moonbound.)
Sloan upends the whole idea of “destiny” in the book (the first of a planned series) so surprises abound as Ariel ventures out into a world brilliantly imagined, where, with every page turned, readers will ask: “What happens next?”
