Book review: Moonbound by Robin Sloan
Moonbound, by Robin Sloan, was an excellent read. I believe that those who have A Lot of Thoughts about The Book of the New Sun would also have A Lot of Thoughts about this book, too.
Just a warning that this review will contain moderate-to-major spoilers for the Moonbound and mild spoilers for BotNS. I refrain from discussing specific plot beats from the middle or later parts of Moonbound.
It's quite an engaging dying-earth science-fantasy Arthurian retelling. One thing you will immediately notice is that Robin Sloan is not in the least bit interested in being coy or dancing around the novel's place in Genre. Instead of leaving us to piece together from context clues that we're actually in a post-apocalyptic setting, we're just immediately exposited all this information by the book's narrator, an AI known as the Chronicler, in the prologue.
I can't say for certain that Sloan was directly inspired by Wolfe. The similarities are innumerable. In the far-flung future, everything is different yet eerily familiar, shaped into some warped fantastical vision of Humanity's mythic past. A boy of mysterious origin has been indoctrinated his whole life, but some transgression has seen him exiled. His sheltered worldview makes him an ideal protagonist in such a strange setting, since he learns about the state of the world along with us, the readers. He has multiple people bouncing around in his head. During the course of his adventures he gets to see many curious ways society could order itself, and we get a lot of musing about the nature of storytelling and of human experience. There are many cheeky literary references the entire time.
Speaking of that, the reason I can't be sure Sloan was directly inspired by Wolfe is that I don't know if he could avoid shouting him out if he was. Arthurian legend, Le Guin, Asimov's Foundation, Studio Ghibli, Batman, Avengers: Infinity War all get very explicit references in one or more places in the book, most of them by name. He very much wears his literary influences on his sleeve, which makes it strange to me that we don't see the name Severian or Gene Wolfe slipped in anywhere. Maybe (gestures vaguely) everything about the overall structure of the book is enough of a reference to make it explicit? Or maybe the Monomyth is truly so powerful that this convergent evolution has happened completely by accident.
As far as fantasy stories set in the far future where technology has become magic and AIs have become gods go, I think Moonbound does something brand new which could only be done post-2020. The AI characters of this story are directly informed by the real-life technology we've come to (perhaps mistakenly) call AI, more specifically large language models (LLMs). Our narrator describes the "language machine" which is one of the fundamental pieces of technology which makes all of the AI characters into conscious beings. In the appendix, there's a timeline that even calls out a specific paper by Google researchers in 2017 as the birth of the "language machine."
One such godlike AI character is a witch who lives at the bottom of a well. An entire magical college has formed around this well to learn from her. Scholars learn the 43,046,721 different "spatial" dimensions which constitute her mind. Here Sloane is transparently describing the "latent space" of a neural network's parameters. Reading Sloan's examples of these dimensions, which included our three dimensions but also emotions like Nostalgia and Sorrow and concepts like Bagelness and Ursula K. Le Guin, I couldn't help but think of this paper by Anthropic which identified certain "features" in their LLM's architecture that they could manually turn the dials on to get the AI speaking in different ways, including as though it were some sort of personification of the Golden Gate Bridge. Scholars of The Witch of Wyrd learn to navigate her manifold space of 43,046,721 dimensions to locate one "aspect" of her which personally suits them, and form a relationship with this aspect over the course of their studies, which to me seems very reminiscent of the way some people get AI to roleplay with them as certain characters - the AI boyfriend subreddit and that sort of thing.
The central thesis of Moonbound, I think, is something like this: storytelling is a deep, elemental aspect of humanity, our culture, the way we think. AI, having been trained on the corpus of all our text, has distilled and become drunk on this storytelling impulse and is now perhaps even more obsessed than us. This distillation of all stories seems to be more in the Jungian sense than the Campbellian sense, though there are shades of both present. Sloan may or may not believe modern LLMs are actually conscious, but certainly asserts with this book that they have captured a core piece of the human experience, and that down the road they will become a piece of the puzzle to creating true AI.
I often try to identify the one "impossible thing" that's central to a sci-fi story. Usually it's FTL or something like that. In Asimov's Foundation, for instance, it's not pocket-sized fusion reactors or FTL or any of the other incidental gadgets we see, but rather the mathematical field of Psychohistory.
For Moonbound, as much as I think the story is about AI, I don't think that's the Central Impossible Thing. No, even more core to the story is the genetic biomancy which powers the entire magic system. Earth's entire biosphere was rewritten thousands of years ago in an apocalyptic event, and now all the warm-blooded animals can talk and Wizards walk the earth who can reshape life at a whim. It seems to me that Sloan is very concerned with Humanity's place in Earth's ecology and is very clearly writing his anxieties directly into the setting. To save humanity from destruction by godlike AI "Dragons," we perform a vanishing act, basically melting NGE-style and our DNA is diffused and suffused into all life on earth. For thousands of years, humanity is absent, yet every living thing carries a piece of us. Empires of animals (given this glimmer of humanlike intelligence) rise and fall, until millennia later some mysterious sequence of events causes human Wizards to spring forth once more and get to work bringing humans back from the animals that carry their genetic code. Meanwhile, a climate war is waged in the background between two factions over the amount of carbon in Earth's biosphere. The "Storm Computer" wants to flood the whole world by pumping the atmosphere full of greenhouse gases, while a society of beavers works tirelessly to offset it by locking away carbon in their bogs.
So, Sloan is fascinated by and optimistic about AI, but is very aware of its possible environmental impact. I'm kind of glad for this, I don't think I could suffer through a book of sci-fi written by someone who had fully bought into the techbro hype machine, as much as I also find myself fascinated by the technology. There's no heavy-handed "AI Bad" moral either; Robin Sloan is wisely concerned first and foremost with crafting an engaging story, it doesn't feel preachy in either direction.