Moonbound
A Novel
Picador · Print & ebook · June 10, 2025
Robin Sloan expands the Penumbraverse to new reaches of time and space in a rollicking far-future adventure.
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- Who it’s for
- A far-future quest brings dragons, ancient AI, and the pleasures of a story aware of itself.
- Themes
- Artificial intelligence, World-saving quest, Story and human history
- Pacing
- Fast
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Robin Sloan expands the Penumbraverse to new reaches of time and space in a rollicking far-future adventure. It is eleven thousand years from now. A lot has happened, and yet a lot is still very familiar. Ariel is a boy in a remote village under a wizard’s rule. Like many adventurers before him, Ariel is called to explore a world full of eye-popping discoveries and challenges: unknown enemies, a mission to rescue the world, a girl. Here, as they say, be dragons.
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But none of this happens before Ariel encounters an entity from an earlier civilization, a sentient, sensitive artificial intelligence with a special perspective on all of human history—who becomes both Ariel’s greatest ally . . . and our narrator. Moonbound is an adventure into the richest depths of Story itself from the creator of the Penumbraverse, Robin Sloan. It is a deeply satisfying epic of ancient scale, blasted through the imaginative prism of one of our most forward-thinking writers. And this is only the beginning.
Old Tales, New Cosmos
A far-future quest brings dragons, ancient AI, and the pleasures of a story aware of itself.
Come here for
- Dragons, eye-popping discoveries, and a rescue mission on an ancient scale
- A sentient AI narrator with a perspective spanning human history
Expect
- A familiar quest shape refracted through far-future science fiction
- Epic scale with a playful interest in Story
Where it sits
| Epic Fantasy | 41% |
|---|---|
| Dragons & Mythic Creatures | 27% |
| Sci-Fi Adventure | 27% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- Epic Fantasy
- Literary Fiction
- Sci-Fi Adventure
- Authors
- Robin Sloan
- Publisher
- Picador
- Published
- June 10, 2025
- Format
- Print & ebook
- Theme
- Artificial intelligence · World-saving quest · Story and human history
- Reading lane
- Epic Fantasy