Sufficiently advanced technology

The idea of the quest is something that feels firmly embedded in genre fiction. It's an easy tool for an author to grab for a story: a task for their characters that often takes them on a challenging journey to accomplish some sort of task. The best quests aren't really about what the characters are trying to find; they end up being the ones where they discover something intrinsically important to who they are – and by extension, imparts us with some new understanding of the world and the human condition.

One of the best quests that I embarked on this year came through Robin Sloan's latest novel, Moonbound, a rollicking journey set in the very distant future that blends Arthurian legend and post-humanism to imagine a spectacular adventure that takes a boy from his remote village into a wider, stranger world.

Sloan introduces us to a fascinating world 11,000 years in the future. Earth has been utterly transformed: a long-ago battle with artificial intelligences known as Dragons has enveloped the world in an impenetrable sky. Life on the surface has regressed to a sort of feudalism, shaped by the after-effects of climate change in the 20th century and the transformation of the human race into something stranger.

Narrated by an artificial intelligence, we follow the journey of a 12-year-old-boy named Ariel de la Sauvage, who's grown up in a feudal village in the countryside ruled by a wizard named Malory. The wizard tasks Ariel with recovering the legendary sword Excalibur. Ariel ventures out beyond his home and encounters something unexpected: a pod with the preserved body of Altissa Praxa, this fungus-based AI chronicler, and a sword - a weapon that's decidedly not Excalibur. Angering the wizard, Ariel flees along with the AI chronicler and the sword, discovering that the outside world is far stranger than he ever could have imagined.

We encounter intelligent beavers, robots, fungi, and more as Ariel sets to solve his problems by activating a beacon to call down an army from space, only to be greeted with a girl named Durga. She had been trained by humans long ago to take on the dragons in orbit, and she'll help him if he finds a way to help her.

This is an astonishing, gripping, and imaginative read as Sloan carries us over this radically transformed landscape. As Ariel undertakes this mammoth task of trying to figure out what to do about Malory, Sloan feeds us a wonderful meditation that touches on the nature of intelligence and storytelling; how we use myths and legends to try and make sense of a world that we don't fully understand.

Arthur C. Clarke's famous adage "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" came readily to mind while I read this book: a world where technology has advanced in so many strange directions, it's largely gone beyond what they – and us readers – can really comprehend. There are strange distributed intelligences and advanced artificial intelligences embedded throughout the landscape that we meet along the way, and as we follow our heroes, another of Clarke's saying comes to mind: "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."

Ariel's journey across the land on his quest takes him from his small world of the possible and into directions that vastly expand his understanding of the world around him. As we come toward the end and encounter the dragons he's after, Sloan's showing us that the quest isn't necessarily a search for an object: it's the knowledge and wisdom that we pick up along the way that's the ultimate goal.

Moonbound has been on my mind ever since I finished it earlier this year: it's a brilliantly-constructed meditation on the nature of storytelling and our existence in this strange world that we inhabit.