I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: hiatus

[READ: February 1, 2025] Moonbound

Back in 2012 I read Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore and really loved it.

Then I pretty much forgot about him until this past year’s Advent Calendar collection of short stories.  He had a story “In the Stacks” that was about libraries and was touching and sweet, but also quite cool.  And I saw that he had written a new book, Moonbound.

My wife also heard about it and she checked out out, but I grabbed it first and started to read it.

And boy it just took me forever to get through it.  I don’t know what it was about this book (which has many many great reviews), but everything about the story felt really flat to me.  It felt really long (400 pages) and felt like there was no sense of urgency.

It was also set in the very distant future (13,000 years from now), when a [human?] species called the Anth were all but extinct .  One of the problems for me was that there was no really compelling explanation for the backstory.

The Anth (we never know why humans are called that)  were destroyed dragons.  But these dragons were created by the Anth as AI creates who were sent pout to explore the universe.  But they returned with new information, took over the moon, attacked the Anth and defeated them and then covered the Earth in a dense cloud so now one has ever seen the sky beyond.   And using radio s forbidden.

Now, I don’t care if there’s no explanation for things, but there’s a LOT of unexplained stuff and it all just feels like …  well, it feels like this is going to be a series of books and that things will be explained later.

At some point in the past humans started interbreeding (to prevent the dragons from thinking that there were still humans.  This means that mammals can talk.  And for some reason all the birds are dead

We open on a boy called Ariel who lives in a small town that is ruled by a wizard.  He is exploring in the woods and finds a crashes space ship with a dead body.  When he investigates, he unwittingly “ingests” a sentient, record-keeping artificial intelligence that carries with it the perspective of the whole of human history.  This unknown being (which lives near Ariel’s shoulder) is the narrator.

This being is connected to Aiel so it knows what the boy thinks.  It also manages to communicate somewhat with Ariel.  But it can’t control ariel, although it might influence him some.

Ariel’s brother is meant to do battle in an arena but he loses his sword.  Ariel rushes out to grab a sword for him because he saw one in the crashed vehicle.  When he grabs it, it starts talking to him (it is a sword full of bloodlust).  But it turns out he was supposed to grab a sword from a stone to set a series of events in motion (sound familiar?  yes, it does).

But when the Wizard Malory gets angry at Ariel, Ariel flees the town and heads off on an adventure.

When I saw the first Lord of the Rings movie, I fell asleep a bunch [this is not a criticism of the movie, I just fall asleep in the theaters a lot].   I woke up throughout the movie and my takeaway from the movie was that they walked a lot and then arrived somewhere where something happened.

And that’s how I felt about this.  He travelled to one place and met talking beavers.  Then he travelled to another place, Rath Variam where he became comfortable and felt like he could settle down.  He meets a robot who has many instances of itself  that all share a brain.  And then the Wizard’s bloodhound creatures tracks him down.

So, the urgency of the quest is clearly not very high, if he’s willing to settle down in this community and become a well-liked person.

Eventually, he is able to call out to the ship that has been circling the earth for 11,000 years, where the seven dragon army has been waiting in status to help them (or so the legend goes).

There’s a ton of pop cultural references in this story, but perhaps the weirdest is the fact that The White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army has been turned into Seven Dragon Army (but the lyrics still reference Wichita).  Why would a White Stripes song appear in a book set 11,000 years on the future?  I dunno.

As the book went on I enjoyed it more.  The land of Shivelight and Shadowtackle (run by beavers) was fun.  They had a cool way of debating that is impossible to summarize, but was fun to read about.

And then the College of Wyrd was a thoroughly enjoyable section.  But again, Ariel spends like 7 months there.  There is no sense of urgency at all.  But it is in Wyrd, that Ariel encounters the Wyrm, and that’s a delightful sequence of events as he talks to this fascinating creature.

And then the book ends kind of quickly.

But even the ending felt flat.  There just never seemed to be anything exciting going on–just a series of things that happened.

As the story neared the end I was concerned that it was going to reveal itself as a part one of many.  It sure felt like it wasn’t going to end.   But it did.  And I suppose there could be another story following it. But I won’t be reading it.