fantasy

So, inevitably, we talk a lot more, and meta-ly, about language, words, meaning—though Sloan doesn’t think it was inevitable that language would be the breakthrough AI technology. Could’ve been vision, he says; could’ve been something else. But now that it is language, and now that it can write, he’s excited to be the kind of writer the machines are not. Just take a look at Moonbound, which comes out today and is Sloan’s first proper work of science fiction. He thinks it’s his best-written, most human-sounding book so far—by far. It’s certainly his most ambitious: thematically, characterologically, even punctuationally. I…