(2023-11-01) Sloan Moonbound

Robin Sloan: on Moonbound! The title of my new novel, coming in June 2024 from MCD×FSG, is: Moonbound: The Last Book of the Anth

I’ve just created a mini-site that will collect every­thing I write about the project.

Leading the way, you’ll find the first clues about the novel’s content. Also noteworthy: I intend this book as the first in a trilogy. Here’s why.

this period, October through December, is the season of mass: bulky bins of olives chore­o­graphed into the crusher.

California’s San Joaquin Valley is best under­stood as a giant, open-air factory floor. I don’t mean that in any pejo­ra­tive sense; rather, the opposite: this might be the world’s biggest, most produc­tive factory. My point is simply that it’s totally engineered, densely woven with infrastucture. It’s amazing, in this season, to see the trucks constantly rolling, pulling gondola trailers brimming over with tomatoes or almonds, bound for humongous processing facilities. Nothing is inde­pen­dent here: every one of these oper­a­tions relies on a thick web of capital (machines) and capa­bility (people who can fix the machines).

My work with Fat Gold has been a terrific education in all the tech­nolo­gies that make this place possible.

The wheel gets a lot of credit — and sure, wheels are handy — but more and more, I think the key to human civi­liza­tion is probably: the pump.

Premonition of a Dragon Moon

A companion website work-in-progress. My new novel, titled Moonbound, will be published next year. You have therefore arrived a bit early. Not to worry — I’m here, too, and I’ll be adding material steadily between now and June 2024.

Notes toward a pitch

In June, a crisp, appealing pitch will not be optional

Here is what’s in my head now, floppy but accurate:

In this novel, I describe two futures. First, a near future of humanity, in which we solve many of our largest problems, and become the civi­liza­tion we are capable of becoming. Second, a distant future, in which things have gone awry for Earth

Here’s another attempt, a bit shorter: The year is 13777. There are dragons on the moon.

Moonbound is the kind of book I have always wanted to write. It is totally engaging for adults — the tone, style, and vocab­u­lary are unchanged from my previous novels — but/and I believe it’s also acces­sible to young readers, from perhaps 12 on up.

Here is Moonbound described by my editors at MCD×FSG, char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally punchy and electric:

It is thirteen thousand years from now … A lot has happened, and yet a lot is still very familiar. Ariel is a boy in a small town under a wizard’s rule. Like many adven­turers before him, Ariel is called to explore a world full of unimag­in­able glories and challenges: unknown enemies, a mission to save the world, a girl. Here, as they say, be dragons. But none of this happens before Ariel comes across an artifact from an earlier civi­liza­tion, a sentient, record-keeping arti­fi­cial intel­ligence that carries with it the perspec­tive of the whole of human history — and becomes both Ariel’s greatest ally and the narrator of our story.

The evidence mounts: you’re better off letting other people describe your books. Maybe so, but I still need something to SAY! I need to sell this thing to a potential reader in like … two sentences.

Theories about series

My vision isn’t just for a book, but a trilogy

Moonbound begins in a village; the trilogy’s desti­na­tion is the cosmos, with mean­ingful stops at every zoom level in between.

the series is a genre unto itself, and its genre prop­er­ties are mainly temporal. The series is a work-in-time: THAT is what makes it fun

You might object, correctly, that you can read and enjoy a series many years after it’s been completed. That’s true, but remember: the series would not have succeeded — would not have circu­lated suffi­ciently to find its way, eventually, to you — without that initial flux of realtime energy

Of course, we also have to consider the series that linger … and stretch … and slow … and stop. These are the great cautionary tales. Returning to my premise above, I think these series are so disappointing — so deflating — precisely because the writer has betrayed that electric sense of “in it together”. The writer is, in fact, hardly “in it” at all. What a bummer.