Moonbound
I don't like doing negative reviews, but here we are
I’m back after my little break! Our friend is back home and I’m just recovering from dental surgery, so I have plenty of time to read and write now.
Moonbound, by Robin Sloan
Moonbond has a really interesting premise and narrator. You are dropped in a civilization 13.000 years from now after humans were defeated by “Dragons” - human-engineered AI beings that travelled across the stars and, when they came back to Earth, decided we were better off not being able to interact with anything outside of Earth. That caused a massive war that we ended up losing. The narrator is a sentient AI whose goal is to record the lives of people it’s implanted on. It was implanted in one of the last fighters that tried to defeat the Dragons and ends up, by chance in the body of a young kid thousands of years after the defeat. We follow the young boy, Ariel, in a world that has similarities with our own but also many, many differences. The most obvious one is that (many) animals talk, and everyone expects them to. The world is weird and confusing, and I loved it. I love a good weird fictional setting, like in Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne or Southern Reach trilogy.
Unfortunately, the more I kept reading, the more disappointed I was. The last fourth of the book felt incredibly rushed and breaks its own internal logic. And I think I had a real “bitch eating crackers” moment after I finished it, where I kept pulling at threads that weren’t explained or that broke internal logic. So, what got me so upset about the ending? Spoilers in the paragraph below:
Beyond Ariel just submitting to Mallory’s wishes… when Ariel physically steps on the moon through the portal and survives enough time to make the Dragons sleep, that’s completely unreal. Now hear me out. It was well established that we didn’t need to breathe for long periods of time and could withstand the cold. But he didn’t have any adaptations for the lack of atmosphere and consequent depressurization. He would basically suffer from what could be considered decompression sickness, also called the bends. He wouldn’t have lived for long. This breaks internal logic and the laws of physics. And it makes me so upset that, as I mentioned, I started pulling at other threads: It’s presented to us that only mammals go through the “humanization” process that allows them to speak. And yet, the bees that live on the deer’s antlers talk to Ariel early in the story, and Mallory’s henchman were toads. We only see herbivores in the story - where are the predators? What would happen in a society where you had to hunt and eat prey that would talk back to you? No internal consistency. And I’m not even going to touch on the fact that it’s incredibly anthropocentric and is indirectly broadcasting humans as being more “evolved” than other animals - because that enters in “bitch eating crackers” territory.
Overall, I enjoyed reading the book almost until the end. And I really disliked the ending. If some scientific and internal inconsistencies aren’t going to bother you, and you enjoy weird settings, you are probably going to enjoy this book. It just wasn’t for me.
I should have a more positive book review next week, since I’ve finished a number of books I really enjoyed, and there’s also a Reading Glasses readathon coming up this weekend, which I’m super excited about!
These two weeks I’ve:
Read (review coming soon):
Mirror Lake, by Juneau Black (book)
All This and More, by Peng Shepherd (book)
The Brides of High Hill, by Nghi Vo (book)
The New Girl, by Cassandra Calin (book)
Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement, by Ashley Shew (book)
What Feasts at Night, by T. Kingfisher (ebook)
Continued Reading:
Dracula Daily, by Bram Stoker (substack)
Started Reading:
On a Sunbeam, by Tillie Walden
Mrs. Quinn's Rise to Fame, by Olivia Ford