MOONBOUND

A sentient artifact that witnessed the fall of human civilization becomes a friend and advisor to a boy who discovers it many lifetimes later.

Twelve-year-old Ariel de la Sauvage has never seen a blue sky or tasted tomato sauce. Millennia before he began life in the small, remote village of Sauvage, humanity was defeated by AI-begat “dragons” in a war to end all wars, changing the course of life on Earth forever. While exploring the valley around Sauvage, Ariel discovers an object dating back to that era: a spaceship’s escape pod, entombed in a cave revealed by the calving of a glacier. In addition to the body of human warrior Altissa Praxa, the pod holds the chronicling device that served Altissa in life, a sophisticated and self-aware apparatus designed to record human memories. (For its part, the chronicler describes itself as “a hearty fungus onto which much technology has been layered, at extraordinary expense.”) Making the leap from Altissa to Ariel, the chronicler, who acts as the book’s narrator, finds society transformed. Animals talk. Robots roam the roads. Wizards hold sway, including the Wizard Malory, the ruler of Sauvage. When Ariel inadvertently thwarts Malory’s secret plans one day, revealing an intricate conspiracy revolving around Ariel himself, he incurs the wizard’s wrath and only manages to escape Sauvage by the skin of his teeth. Pursued by Malory and his forces, Ariel is aided by a colorful cast of characters ranging from an elk to a bog body to a trash picker as he searches for a way to defeat the wizard—and figure out why Malory wants him in the first place. Thanks to the chronicler’s distinct voice and novel point of view, it makes for an ingenious choice of narrator; the plot itself is replete with thorny quests and arduous journeys in the manner of classics like A Wrinkle in Time and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, though the finale feels somewhat rushed and leaves a few questions hanging. Coming at the dawn of the AI era, this is a thoughtful (and hopefully not prescient) book that, like its characters, asks: What happens next?

An expansive adventure that blends fantasy and SF to address one of the most pressing issues of our time.