Mandaris

I heard about this book📚 on episode 757 of The Incomparable podcast. It seemed like a nice little distraction and was a nice little adventure.

The book description states that it’s part of a wider universe, but I feel the story is mostly self contained with an option to make it the start of a larger series. The author has even set up a webpage that contains information about the book. I especially like the Notes on influence section.

He even has a video on making the script for the novel.

So check it out if you want to do a little light reading.

Overview

Robin Sloan expands the Penumbraverse to new reaches of time and space in a rollicking far-future adventure. It is eleven thousand years from now. A lot has happened, and yet a lot is still very familiar. Ariel is a boy in a remote village under a wizard’s rule. Like many adventurers before him, Ariel is called to explore a world full of eye-popping discoveries and challenges: unknown enemies, a mission to rescue the world, a girl. Here, as they say, be dragons. But none of this happens before Ariel encounters an entity from an earlier civilization, a sentient, sensitive artificial intelligence with a special perspective on all of human history—who becomes both Ariel’s greatest ally . . . and our narrator. Moonbound is an adventure into the richest depths of Story itself from the creator of the Penumbraverse, Robin Sloan. It is a deeply satisfying epic of ancient scale, blasted through the imaginative prism of one of our most forward-thinking writers. And this is only the beginning.