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By Adam Roberts | May 16, 2008
Categories: Book News
Well, who'd have thought the Guardian would review Ian Whates's bsfa collection Celebration? But they did, and this is what they said:
As Whates states in his Afterword, "The British Science Fiction Association is all about the people who read, watch, talk about, dream about and are passionate about science fiction." And that passion shows in the 17 stories selected to commemorate the BSFA's 50th year. They range in tone from the sombre to the humorous, and include many of the most cherished examples of the genre by luminaries such as Aldiss, Baxter, Stableford, Priest and Watson, as well as a couple of off-beat offerings: Molly Brown's mordant zombie story and Dave Hutchinson's clever amalgam of fantasy and science fiction in which elves take over a post-technological Britain. The volume ends on a high note with Adam Roberts' arch "The Man of the Strong Arm", in which a male-dominated society is threatened by a truth buried in the text of a rediscovered artform, science fiction.
The Morning Star reviews Swiftly
By Adam Roberts | May 12, 2008
Categories: Book News
Do they like it? You can read Mat Coward's words yourself and judge:
Set in the tumultuous year of 1848 SWIFTLY by Adam Roberts is an extraordinary novel, which shows us a world where Lemuel Gulliver famous account of his travels was fact, not fiction.
Of course, that might be 'extraordinarily bad', not 'extraordinarily good'. So I read on. But it all comes good:
This is very much science fiction, not fantasy, in its approach and its philosophy. It is also a strange love story, a satirical social history and a book about the horrors of war. At times the reader needs a strong stomach and, sometimes simultaneously, strong laughter muscles. Roberts has perhaps the most untrammelled imagination in British fiction and here, in the best traditions of the picaresque novel, he lets it roam freely to unforgettable effect.
Guardian on Swiftly
By Adam Roberts | April 13, 2008
Categories: Book News
Eric Brown briefly on Swiftly:
Roberts is king of the thought-experiment, and this novel begins with a grand conceit. It's 1848, and Britain and France are at war - aided respectively by the Lilliputians and the Brobdingnagians from Gulliver's Travels. Abraham Bates, opposed to his country's enslavement of the little people, has turned traitor. Seconded by the French military to escort a computational device from London to York, he falls into the company of opium addict Henry Oldenberg, the dean of York, and in love with Eleanor Burton, who combines sexual naivety with scientific precocity. What follows is both a compulsive comedy of manners and a free-wheeling metaphysical riff on the nature of religion, the universe and scale, with the arrival of extraterrestrials far larger than the Brobdingnagians.
That's cocaine, not opium, but otherwise a decent review. Compulsively free-wheeling, you know.
Celebration
By Adam Roberts | April 11, 2008
Categories: Book News
In the post yesterday, my contributor's copy of Ian Whates's splendid bsfa anthology of original fiction, Celebration (My contribution is called 'The Man of the Strong Arm'):
Nice cover, isn't it? I'm halfway through the stories and there's some beauties in there. You could buy a copy, you know. You could.
Slimey old Salt
By Adam Roberts | April 10, 2008
Categories: Blogging
Dr Simon Park has been feeding my books to his slime mould:
Deathray on Swiftly
By Adam Roberts | March 30, 2008
Categories: Book News
I'm going to quote Guy Haley's review of Swiftly in full here, because it seems to me spot-on (about the weaknesses and the strengths, both, of the novel); and if I'm infringing his or Deathray's copyright I trust him to let me know.
Another intriguing novel from one of the UK's most important working writers of sf, and one of his best.
I'm going to call this literary, and that's going to get me into trouble. We rail against the tedious taxonomic classification of
books, especially using such an emotive term, connoted as it is with snobbery and superiority. No doubt this hypocrisy on my part will plunge like a Lilliputian dagger into the eyes of various readers, but it stands, because you know exactly what I mean. By small conveniences do we aggravate one another.Swiftly is an expansion of Roberts' short story, an ingenious extrapolation of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. It is 144 years after Gulliver returned home. Britain and France are at war, and the marvellous creatures Gulliver encountered have been inevitably subdued and enslaved by the European power.
There are many areas where the book excels. Its description of a world made wondrous by the advent of Brobdingnagian sheep, talking cavalry and Lilliputian craftsmen (whose tiny hands allow them to construct fantastical machines) is entrancing, the middle act is an amusingly apt rebuke to the 19th century romantic novel, and in the final stages we are treated to an imaginative dissection of Swiftly's multi-scalar universe.
Less successful is the book's theme of the worthiness of a man to be loved. Roberts goes too far in his abasement of his protagonist Abraham Bates; among many other penances, he makes Bates a coprophiliac who loathes his own arousal. Admittedly, Roberts does nothing without reason -- Bates' peccadilloes illustrate the gloriously physical reality of love, furthering the story's debunking of Victorian romantic myth, and they form a sly scatalogical adjunct of the book's discourse on scale and corruption. But Bates begins with indignity already heaped upon him, and to have him have to redeem himself through yet more indignifty seems suffering for suffering's sake. It's almost Catholic, and Bates is no Christ.
Yet this is a small criticism. The book fully takes up the beat of Swift's drum on the contrariness of human nobility, and Roberts cleverly carries on the mode of reversal that the original novel employs. We have the Houyhnhnms, the most rational of Swift's creations, recast as broken beasts of burden, the gentle Brobdingnagians forced to fight as soldiers, and arrogant Europeans compelled to embrace their own insignificance. Finally, Bates finds peace within his own grubby world, something Gulliver failed to achieve.
It's a good taste of Roberts' work, sporting many of his tropes: Bates is flawed, a naive, depressive idealist who betrays is country; there's an antagonistic supporting character in the shape of the cocaine-addled Dean of York; we meet a number of obstructive, ambivalent authority figures; and there's a difficult journey on foot, and a war which our hero has little stomach for. It's not a retreading of old ground, however. These are merely some of the authors' favourite stage settings ,and he knows how to employ them well.
Swiftly is probably the most accessible of Roberts' books to date, too. Besides the readership's obvious familiarity with the source material, his prose has found an agreeable balance in its literary flourish, and his three main characters, though still Robertsian in their flaws and peculiarities, are easy to befriend. The narrative loses some of its steam towards the end, but, like the Brobdingnagians, the book has a big heart.
He writes an intimate book, does Roberts, and you get the feeling his characters must suffer so much because he believes himself, not them, to be unworthy. I suspect that when Roberts' confidence grows a little, we will see a truly great work, rather than a merely excellent one, from this most fascinating of authors.
SFX on Swiftly
By Adam Roberts | March 28, 2008
Categories: Book News
Richard Cobbett offers his opinion of the book in the latest SFX:
Some speculative fiction ideas just jump right out of the page, and this is definitely one of them: a historical epic set in an England where Lemuel Gulliver was more than just the main character in a book by Jonathan Swift. ...
Swiftly is, ironically, a slow-paced novel, not outright mimicking the flowery style of the era, but certainly taking its share of cues from it. There’s little of the satire that made the classic that inspired it such a lasting success, but that’s not a problem – Adam Roberts is simply using Swift’s creations, not writing a sequel to his original story, and the change of style helps to give Swiftly its own distinct universe. It’s an excellent piece of historical fantasy in its own right, and would likely stand even without the Gulliver connection.
What makes the main story so interesting is the merging of human politics with the new inhuman characters; the struggles between France and England due to the addition of new manpower and technology imported from the rediscovered islands. It’s familiar, but just different enough to be fresh ...
The concept behind Swiftly was strong the first time Roberts used it, as a short story in a collection (which was also, confusingly, called Swiftly) and as a full novel it really gets time to breathe. It’s almost enough to make you grab a boat and head out in search of new islands.
Splendid. I'm still waiting for a copy of the most recent Deathray to arrive in Staines, since it contains a review of the same novel by Sir Guy Haley, no less; but it hasn't made it to any of this town's newsagents yet.
News
By Adam Roberts | March 27, 2008
Categories: Chitchat
A couple of brief items, foremost among them: Darren Turpin, known to some by the spritely monker Ariel, is the man who made this website. He did a fine job, too, as you can see by looking around. More, he has maintained it expertly since creating it despite my periodic attempts at smashing it up from within, and has been a friend of mine for years now: one of the most grounded, wise, good-humoured and expert men I know. The news that Orbit have finally given him gainful employment really is of the 'couldn't happen to a nicer guy' variety. It'll mean I'll need to find a new webmaster, but that's a small price to pay: congratulations, Darren, and good luck.
Other News: a couple of people have asked me whether I'll be doing a round-up review of the Clarke 08 shortlist, as has been my habit for a few years now. I'd gladly do this, but my usual place (infinity plus) has come to the end of its natural span. I talked a couple of other venues but they either didn't want me or didn't reply, so I may be spared the labour of writing the round-up this year. (I daresay I could jot some thoughts down on one of my blogs. Of course nobody reads my blogs, but that might actually be a liberating factor when it comes to the writing).
Overall it's not a shortlist about which I can say me gusto: not, although this has been the complaint of some others, on account of the proportion of 'mainstream lit' titles it features, for I don't see anything wrong in that, but because it's all rather samey. All of these books are historically-proximate alt-historical or near-future thrillers/adventure stories. Tom Hunter, the award administrator, has described the list as a 'map' of the contemporary SF scene, but if it is it's like one of those gag-maps you used to be able to buy: 'map of the world from the point of view of a Bostonite' which is two-thirds Cape Cod with other elements squashed to the horizon; or 'map of the world from the point of view of a Chelsea resident' which is 75% Sloane Square and the King's Road, with 'the north' running along the top border and nothing else there. (This sort of thing, in fact).
Or maybe Hunter is correct, and this list does indeed represent the state of SF today, rather than, say, just representing the taste of a judging panel who all happen to like reading alt-now/near-future thrillery adventure stories. But that would be a slightly depressing thing: a symptom of a genre shrinking and dessicating from the fullest scope of its imaginative possibility into a subset of airport thrillerdom. The best books on the list are probably the Baxter and the Morgan, but none of the titles here embody the mind-stretching, the sense-of-wonder, the conceptual metaphoricity and poetic, imagistic penetration of the SF that first made me fall in love with the genre. (An exception to this last judgment might be made for the Raw Shark Texts; but I found a deadening literalism to the way that novel handled its core metaphor, indebted to but lacking the sparkle of The Phantom Tollbooth; and I thought the Jaws-intertext was clunkily treated). Again, apart (to some extent) from the Baxter, they're all rather straightforward texts. Irony is not their idiom. They are books that if they are serious (about dystopia, the situation of the world today etc) are strenuously serious, and that if they are intertextual are ponderously rather than playfully intertextual. Naturally this, and that last point especially, is a statement of personal taste, not a broader aesthetic judgment: lots of people, inside and outside the genre, dislike ironic art. They prefer to know where they stand.
Finally: I learn today that my story 'Petrolpunk' has been bought by Nick Gevers for the Solaris steampunk collection Extraordinary Engines. Hurrah! The buzz surrounding this collection has been very good, and I'm chuffed to be on board. The fact that I said nice things about Nick in my previous post is an entirely unrelated matter; although my understanding is that he is indeed a tall, powerfully-built stallion of a man with an IQ in the thousands.
Gevers judges Swifters
By Adam Roberts | March 22, 2008
Categories: Book News
Nick Gevers is one of the best reviewers working in SF today: deeply knowledgeable about the genre and with both eloquence and an impeccable judgment. He has not always liked my fiction overmuch previously, so it's particularly gratifying to read his review of my latest over at SFSite.
Swiftly ... is an enormously ambitious novel, a steampunk epic of considerable force and ingenuity. It is also a deeply bizarre book, whose protagonists, sometimes to the detriment of the plot, conduct a love affair based on disgust and the stimulating odor of excrement. Why Roberts chose this admixture of elements is a little mysterious, unless it serves as a commentary on the original Dean Swift's fascination with smutty jokes and toilet humor. As well, the eighteenth century, whose spirit the novel explores, was generally an age of smells and off-color bawdiness; maybe that indeed plays a part ... Despite its peculiarities, Swiftly may be Roberts's best novel so far. It is a book he had in mind for a long time, and its maturity of conception is impressive.
That's spot-on, I'd say, though it would be nice if that 'despite' in the last sentence there were 'because of'. But one can't have everything.
More Swiftly reviews
By Adam Roberts | March 13, 2008
Categories: Book News
SFRevue respect rather than love the novel: 'An endlessly inventive writer, Adam Roberts can, it seems, turn his hand to any kind of science fiction story ... The result is more admirable than it is enjoyable, but once again it confirms Roberts as one of our most intelligent and versatile authors and I look forward to seeing what he offers up next' says John Berlyne.
SFX like it, expressing their liking with four stars. Mind you, in the selfsame issue they note the appearance of the mass-market paperback of Land of the Headless in much less positive terms. They don't like it. They call it 'oddball.' It was another one of those double-take moments for me, the realisation that for SF criticism 'oddball' is a term of dispraise. (Doesn't that seem wrongheaded to you? Isn't oddball something you go to SF for--to escape the deadening slick professional sheen of airport thrillers and sagas?) Ah well; there's no accounting for tastes. Perhaps what's wanted are the trappings of oddness, not an oddness that goes all the way down to the balls. But of course, I would say that, wouldn't I. I can choose to believe that reviewers just don't know what to make of my fiction, when it's just as likely they do know what to make of it, they just don't like it.
Swiftly reviews
By Adam Roberts | February 26, 2008
Categories: Book News
Dan Hartland, over at Strange Horizons, has some thoughtful and, by and large, praising things to say about Swiftly:
In Swiftly, he takes [his] talent for cannibalisation to a more serious end—he creates a world which, in its variety of familiar motifs, reminds us of something we should know and yet is not. We feel at home here, even whilst being constantly reminded that we are far from that. Roberts deepens yet further our empathy for his at-sea protagonists. The world has changed—I feel it in the prose.
...
Swift's hatred of structures and systems, but his love of individuals with their foibles and quirks, is brought to the fore in Swiftly, a worthy science fictional successor to Swift's indispensable masterwork. If Roberts has explicated Swift's surreal world with wit and not a little learning, he has also in no small part written a book equal parts adventure story and social commentary. Its philosophy is Swift's, but its success is all Roberts's own.
He has some small problems with the way the original short-story has been reworked into a full-length novel, and with aspects of the characterisation, but he also says that this is 'criticism which doesn't have much to say about how enjoyable the book is to read', which is nice.
In another medium, Anthony Browne at the fruity and opal Starburst magazine gives it a full-page review; he also has some very nice things to say, although some less positive things too, and on balance the latter rather outweigh the former: 3 stars out of 5. I console myself by thinking, perhaps erroneously, that they are the best three stars: stars three, four and five, perhaps, and not the baser, less valuable stars one and two. Who knows?
French Gradisil
By Adam Roberts | February 19, 2008
Categories: Book News
Ceci c'est la couverture de la prochaine édition en français de mon roman, publiée par le formidable Bragelonne. Belle, non?
As you can see, my French is fairly ropey. Luckily the expert literary French of Elisabeth Vonaburg, who has undertaken this translation, is not. She and I were in correspondence during the process, and I have the highest respect for her. Can't wait to get my hands on an actual copy.
News
By Adam Roberts | January 29, 2008
Categories: Events and Appearances
A couple of books have been delivered through the slot in my front door over the last few days; I previously mentioned one of these, Conceptual Breakthrough (James Holden and Simon King's marvellous experiment in sf-criticism, to which I contributed an afterword), a couple of months ago; very nice finally to hold a copy in my hand, and very handsome it looks too. The other is the Czech translation of The Soddit. I don't always post about foreign editions of my books, but the cover to this is so elegant and splendid that I wanted to reproduce it here.
Other news: I'll be appearing at the Paris Book Fair, hanging around the booth of the formidable Bragelonne, 15th-16th March, an eventuality occasioned by the imminent appearance of the French translation of Gradisil. I'll also poke my nose in at Orbital Eastercon, just on the Saturday. I may even be on some panels.
Vector on Headless
By Adam Roberts | January 27, 2008
Categories: Book News
Discouraging days. Martin McGrath, fluently and rather wittily, decapitates Land of the Headless in the bsfa journal, Vector, with a scimitar-swinging review that begins by invoking not so much a clever albatross as a clever roc, and goes on to find, well, nothing to like about the book at all. His main charge is that the novel fails as satire. I didn’t mean it to be a satire; but that, somehow, only makes the critique more discouraging. Ah well.
Philip K Dick Award Shortlisting for Gradisil
By Adam Roberts | January 9, 2008
Categories: Book News
I'm pleased as Punch (ahh, if only I were as good looking as Punch ...) that Gradisil has made the shortlist for the 2008 Philip K. Dick Award. Here's the list:
- Grey, Jon Armstrong (Night Shade)
- Undertow, Elizabeth Bear (Bantam Spectra)
- From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain, Minister Faust (Del Rey)
- Nova Swing, M. John Harrison (Bantam Spectra)
- Gradisil, Adam Roberts (Pyr)
- Ally, Karen Traviss (Eos)
- Saturn Returns, Sean Williams (Ace)
Impressive, what? It's interesting, I'd say, that when arranged alphabetically by author like that, the list of novel titles acrostically spells out GUF 'N' GAS. Not that this is in any way a commentary upon the excellence of the novels shortlisted this year.
BBC History Magazine on History of SF
By Adam Roberts | January 4, 2008
Categories: Lit Crit
Start a post title with an abbreviation + the-word-History, end it palindromically, with the-word-History + an abbreviation, that's my motto. This is courtesy of Stephen Baxter, a giant of contemporary sf (to my Lilliputianiarity) and a friend to boot: he is, I'm guessing, a subscriber to BBC History Magazine, and he spotted this in the January 08 issue. The reviewer is Paul Parsons:
Science Fiction author Brian Aldiss once commented that the genre began in 1818 with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein -- a cautionary tale of science gone hellishly wrong. Now Adam Roberts takes Aldiss to task arguing that the roots of SF writing go back much further, stemming from the fantastic-voyage tales of Grecian antiquity.
Roberts is well-qualified: professor of 19th-century literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. he's also author of over a dozen SF novels and short-form collections. Accordingly, this is a thoroughly researched, very well-informed piece of writing, that charts a convincing course from the Odyssey of Homer through to that of Clarke and Kubrick. There's exhaustively referenced commentary on science fiction from virtuallyu every era, culture and sub-genre. Biographies of the SF greats sit together with musings on the cross-media influence of their work, from video games to Radiohead.
Make no mistake: this isn't a book to meander through in the bath. Roberts has given us a heavyweight critical history of SF literature, television and cinema. Afficionados will relish the detail and give it pride of place on their bookshelves.
Paul Raven on Headless
By Adam Roberts | December 17, 2007
Categories: Book News
At SF Site. The estimable Mr Raven is clear enough that some readers aren't going to like this novel, or the sort of books I write more generally; and he has some fun with the 'clever' albatross; but at the end he has perceptive and positive things to say:
It's a powerful work of philosophical literature, thought-provoking from the outset. Of course, not everyone wants this degree of philosophical depth from a science fiction novel. The "needs bigger ray-guns" lobby will probably find it over-complicated, morally ambiguous, and lacking sufficient action and sensawunda, but I doubt very strongly that Roberts was pitching for that particular set of seats. The linguistic tone may be hard going for some readers, also; in keeping with the overall sense of parody and satire, the prose has more than a hint of the King James biblical to it, which is emphasised by the inherent wordiness of Cavala, the man of letters, delivering the narrative second-hand.
But as I mentioned, Roberts is about as literary a science fiction writer as you're likely to find, and unashamedly so. And he walks the walk as well as talking the talk. Land of the Headless is a powerful piece of work that uses science fictional themes and tropes to shine a light into the dark corners of the world we live in right now, which some would argue is science fiction's highest purpose –- I among them. And nothing truly worthwhile is ever easy –- if that's an attitude you share with respect to your choices of reading, I commend Land of the Headless to you as one of the most clever books published in the genre this year.
Neat, eh? 'Most clever' rather than 'cleverest'. There may be some supersubtle distinction being drawn there. More to the point, I discover that "clever albatross" is a googlewhack. Although presumably it won't be after I post this.
Swiftly proofs
By Adam Roberts | December 14, 2007
Categories: Chitchat
The proofs for Swiftly are here, and I'm going through them with a fine tooth comb. A toothcomb that is fine. A comb with fine teeth. One of them. Well, I say that ... The fact is I'm rubbish at reading proofs, so my wife (who has The Gift when it comes to proofreading; if she were a superhero then reading proofs would be her superpower) is doing it for me. Many thanks to her.
In other news, I'm thirty-thousand words into Yellow Blue Tibia and am enjoying myself. Better, today is the last day of RHUL term, so I'll have (give or take things like the birth of a son) a relatively free run at writing for the next few weeks.
Yes, the birth-of-a-son thing. Today, as well as being the last day of Michaelmas term, is Rachel's due-date. No sign of the baby yet, but presumably any day now.
I am edged gem?
By Adam Roberts | December 5, 2007
Categories: Chitchat
SFRevu seem to think so; viz., comments by John Berlyne:
Roberts, whom I always think must be the hardest working writer in the world, is a real shining gem of British genre fiction and one with many, many facets. No two books of his are alike, and his particular skill is extrapolating an entire novel from the kernel of singular idea.
Many many, no less. I'm flattered.
Bloggage
By Adam Roberts | December 4, 2007
Categories: Blogging
I've titivated and, in one case, retooled my blogs. Europrogo is still daily sententiae; Rambling Ad still a more occasional diary-style ramble (though check out their funky new colour schemes and headers); but Punkadiddle has been Augean-stabled, and will now be used as a place for me to jot down reviewerishesque thoughts about books I've just read. More for my own use than anything else.
Conceptual Breakthrough
By Adam Roberts | November 21, 2007
Categories: Book News
Not my book, this one: but a book written by Simon King and James Holden. I only wrote the afterword here; the meat of this work is two fascinating, detailed and original examples of science fiction criticism by King and Holden.
Star, by James Holden
Dr. Holden wants to show how the protagonists in SF texts never really make it to the stars. Along the way, he finds himself distracted by Derrida, Descartes, Patrick Moore, modernism, and much else besides.Alien, by Simon King
Dr. King is on a hunt; he’s hunting aliens. On the hunt he meets with Japanese cyborgs and medieval monsters, strange gods and the creatures of the deep – but will he find any aliens? Indeed, are there any to find?
My afterword adds little, to be honest, to these literary-critical riches; although it does include two never-before-seen, unavailable-elsewhere short stories (short shorts, you see), one of which--I shan't tell you which one--is the best short story I've ever written. The amazon page for the book is here; and the publisher's site, Inkerman Press, here. Why not buy a copy? Can you give me one good reason? No, you can't.
The Guardian reviews the Palgrave History of SF
By Adam Roberts | November 10, 2007
Categories: Lit Crit
P D Smith, in today's Saturday Guardian review:
According to Margaret Atwood, science fiction is a pulp genre about "intelligent squids in space". Which is strange because, as Adam Roberts says, her best three novels are part of the SF genre. Oryx and Crake (2003) is "an unembarrassed entry into a dazzlingly realised dystopian imaginary world", he writes. As a professor of 19th-century literature as well as a prolific science fiction writer, Roberts is eminently qualified to write a history of the genre. This impressive tome is ambitious in its scope, tracing SF's origins back to the fantastic voyages of the ancient Greek novel - the original Vernean voyages extraordinaires. He identifies four types of SF narrative: voyages through space; time travel; techno fiction; and accounts of Utopia. In all of these, SF "embodies a genuine and radical Will to Otherness, a fascination with the outer reaches of imaginative possibility". One particularly striking claim is that Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake by the Inquisition in 1600 for his science fictional speculations, namely that the universe contained innumerable worlds. Science fiction, it seems, has its first martyr.
Apart from giving the impression that the History is all about Margaret Atwood, with a brief mention of some other stuff (when in fact it's actually about some other stuff, with a brief mention of Margaret Atwood) this is pretty flattering stuff. Excellent.
Korean Jameson
By Adam Roberts | November 9, 2007
Categories: Book News
Nice cover, no? It's for the Korean edition of this book, my introduction to the thought of Fredric Jameson. And what a splendid edition it is, including inside a wealth of illustrations (something the original never had), including pictures of things I don't even discuss: photos of Al Pacino and Gillian Anderson, for instance. All for a mere 12,500 won: a bargain if ever I saw one.
November
By Adam Roberts | November 5, 2007
Categories: Book News
An unusually tough and tiring first half of term has left me fairly worn out.  Still, I've been trying to push on in the writing of a new novel. Since this is set in the Soviet Union I had given it the working title Yellow Blue Tibia, something I chose on the understanding (which I derived from Nabokov, no less) that this English phrase, spoken aloud with the right roll from syllable to syllable, was equivalent to the Russian for 'I Love You'. However, my editor's multi-talented wife, a woman who understands many things better than I do, Russian not least, reports that the phrase means no such thing in Russkiy yazyk. I've been misinformed.  So I've ditched that, and have been writing under the much less appealing working name Russian Novel. This morning, however, I was cudgelling my brain for alternatives. At the moment I'm toying with this as a title: War and War.
What do you reckon?
I've obtained a Teach Yourself Russian book-plus-CD, and am starting, in a rough-and-ready way, to acquire a little of this glorious language. At the moment I'm a little bogged down, on p.7, in a simulated Customs check at Moscow Sheremetyevo International Airport, where a variety of very basic pieces of information are being conveyed between a traveller and a custom's official. But give me time.
In other news, some more reviews of Splinter. One from Dreamwatch Total Sci Fi's Paul Simpson:
The survivor of a global catastrophe has to come to terms with a very different outlook on life… A major part of the story is about his growing up, and realising that the world does not revolve around him – even the smaller splinter of the planet on which he finds himself when some terrible event splits Earth into numerous planetoids which miraculously manage to maintain an atmosphere. Roberts very effectively takes you inside Sevradac’s head, complete with its Freudian slips, loosely remembered pieces of jingles and nursery rhymes and total self-absorption...It’s also an examination of the benefits of being part of a community rather than standing out as an individual, and the trauma when you realise that you have become the ‘adult’ part of a family relationship. We only see the others around Sevradac through his eyes, but can sense their desire to include him until he pushes them away once too often - only eventually to find something that will accept him no matter what... Stylistically Splinter is an unusual novel, with its three sections written in past, present and future tenses respectively, and it's one that stays with you long after you’ve finished it.
And Peter Loftus in Interzone issue #212:Â "Splinter is a re-imagining of a little-known Jules Verne novel, Off on a Comet. Stylistically, the first part of Splinter calls de Lillo and Auster to mind. The writing is crisp, incisive and assured... full marks to Roberts for not playing it safe... devotees of literary sf will find much to love here..."
Strange Horizons on Headless, Splinter
By Adam Roberts | October 15, 2007
Categories: Book News
A very intelligent and perceptive (though of course I would say that wouldn't I) review of both Headless and Splinter at the splendid Strange Horizons. It's by Victoria Hoyle, she of the top-notch Eve's Alexandria, the site which no individual interested in new fiction can afford to ignore.
 I'm a little inhibited from responding to the review, actually, since it is so very positive about both books (although of the two Hoyle prefers Splinter). Also I'm the author, which is to say dead, so my judgment probably isn't the best one. But I thought there were some very penetrating observations in this review, and a genuine understanding of what I'm about as a writer (for good and ill), and Hoyle captures things that go to the heart of these two books. "Like Gradisil before it, The Land of the Headless is a novel about self-delusion and curtailment, both physical and ideological," she says, and she's not wrong.
What makes Splinter different is that Roberts writes much warmer, more rhythmic prose; not less mindful, since his writing is always heavily controlled, but more fertile. Lush, even. Whereas the style of Headless communicates crippling repression and the terrible absence of sensation in its spareness, so Splinter conveys the fecund landscape and frustrated eroticism of the end of the world through its sensual immediacy.
At the end she compares me to Ursula le Guin, which, enormously flattering though it is, is a little discombobulating, since she's a writer so evidently in a different class to me (and, to be fair to me, in a different class to almost everybody writing today).
Swiftly
By Adam Roberts | September 22, 2007
Categories: Book News
This is the cover for Swiftly, to be published by Gollancz next year. It's a work in progress (the rifles there, I'm told, will be muskets rather than arquebuses), but more or less there. And isn't it splendid? As for Swiftly itself, I'd say it's the best novel I've written by quite a long mark. So there you are.
What does Australia think of Headless?
By Adam Roberts | September 18, 2007
Categories: Book News
This:
Gollancz SF works were previously unevenly distributed in Australia. It's a pleasure that they are now readily available, since the publisher has a reputation for quality. Forget sword and sorcery, here are thought-experiments, exercises in imaginative writing. Adam Roberts' novel posits a future in which fundamentalist Christianity and Islam have merged. High-tech means that punishment takes new and cruel forms: criminals can be beheaded but remain living. Jon Cavala, a poet, is beheaded for adultery. He is fitted with devices that replace his sensory apparatus and keep him in a half-life. Cavala wanders the countryside, suffers discrimination, and ends up coerced into becoming a soldier. Here Roberts' speculations about future warfare are very grim. At what point, he posits, do we abandon humanity? This book has a cool tone and intellectual rigour reminiscent of Yevgeny Zamyatin's classic We.
Not for an Age but for all time; or more accurately yes, actually, for an Age, and more specifically for the 16th September 2007 edition of said.
Guardian on Splinter
By Adam Roberts | September 15, 2007
Categories: Book News
The estimable Eric Brown is complimentary:
In 1877 Jules Verne published Off on a Comet, in which a meteor strikes Earth and knocks off a chunk of northern Africa inhabited by a cast of characters who whizz around the solar system before arriving, improbably, back on Earth. Roberts recapitulates the earlier novel, but updates and subverts it, having a wedge of present day California fly off into space with a complement of cult members. While Verne was primarily concerned with telling an adventure story, Splinter is an acute psychological analysis of Hector Servadac Junior, a distant relation of the original novel's protagonist. He's a complex character, obsessed with sex and fixed in a permanent adolescent state due to being unable to break away from domination by his father, an overbearing guru-figure. This is a clever thought-experiment from a writer gaining a reputation for producing a string of wholly original novels.
And whilst we're on the subject, I did something for the online version of The Guardian, the ever-so-slightly hubristically named Guardian Unlimited, on 'Verne's Forgotten Masterpieces', which was also obliquely about Splinter. There's also a competition, and the possibility of winning a copy, at the end of that link. And, finally, I wrote a blog entry on the poverty of Verne-in-English translations, here. (I later wrote a follow up piece on the same topic for the Valve, here). So there's today's Vernish variety, right there.
Give me sf-prize or give me death …
By Adam Roberts | September 10, 2007
Categories: Book News
I learn today that Gradisil has been nominated by LFS members for the 2008 Prometheus Award in the Best Novel category. The Best Novel winner receives a one-ounce gold coin and a plaque, presented at the World Science Fiction Convention.
The nomination is the first part of a lengthy process; a ten-person committee whittles the nominees down to finalists, and thence to a winner; but neverthless ... excellent news!
Deathray on Splinter
By Adam Roberts | September 5, 2007
Categories: Book News
Deathray is fast becoming my favourite sf magazine, despite (or who knows maybe masochistically because) they're not entirely 100% enamoured of Roberts-mode prose sf. Not 100% disenamoured either; somewhere in the middle. Here's Jes Bickham:
Splinter is a conscious, dedicated riff on one of Jules Vernes most bizarre novels--Hector Servadac ... while Hector may be an adult he's not exactly a grown-up, and his struggle to define himself against his father while denying the events that have transpired make him, if not particularly likeable, a complex and believable character. Splinter is a fascinating book on many levels. There's the changing terrain of the 'splinter' itself, which appears to be slowly terraformed by the create that hit the Earth, and the disparate group of personalities surviving upon it, and the endlessly rich central relationship ... ultimately there's a lot to admire here. But in the end, the book is almost as strange and mystifying as its inspiration; the three chapters of the novel are each told in a different tense, past, present and future. It's a novel effect and makes the final chapter something of a fever dream; a possible divination of the future that is ambiguous and opaque, rich with interpretative scope, This is thoughtful, literate sf; low on thrills but offering much food for thought.
The verdict: three and a half stars, making it, in the opinion of Deathray, half-a-star better than Hyperdrive ('mostly laughter-free fun from this oh-too-gentle science fiction comedy'), and half-a-star shy of the dizzy heights of Coyote Ragtime Show Vol 3 ('a dozen sexy android sisters with high calibre weaponry'). Not for the first time in my career, it was a review I had to read twice to divine the actual thrust; not because it is poorly expressed but because my own preconceptions about what sf is got in the way. On a first reading I genuinely thought that the phrase 'almost as strange and mystifying as its inspiration' was an example of pretty much the highest praise a reviewer can offer a book ... why, after all, else go to SF except for strangeness and mystery? This was foolish of me; strangeness and mystery are not what the sf-fan doctor is ordering nowadays. I'm assuming it is those qualities (plus the unlikeability of the central character--when will I learn? Likeable characters only!) that have devalued the precious star rating. Ah well; live and learn.