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Latest News
Zone NMA review
By Adam Roberts | August 31, 2010
Categories: Reviews
Jonathan McCalmont's review of New Model Army has just been posted at The Zone. I don't think I've ever read a more pleasurably gobsmacking review of something I have written. I'm a little amazed at myself, and a touch suspicious, how pleased it makes me. Over at his Ruthless Culture site, McCalmont summarises thuswise:
New Model Army is not merely a good book or an enjoyable book. It is a book that has the potential to reinvigorate science fiction as a literature central to the cultural and political life of the 20th Century. My review examines New Model Army through the prism of a particular understanding of the development of the modern novel. An understanding that suggests that the mainstream literary novel shaped and was shaped by a fundamental change in the way that we see ourselves as a species. A change that gave birth to the concept of the Human Right but also to the capitalist system that we currently live under. By virtue of its tendency to hug the walls of a literary ghetto, science fiction is rather less wedded to this particular politico-literary gestalt than the mainstream literary novel and while this has maginalised science fiction in the eyes of some critics and writers, this marginalisation has resulted in a greater degree of freedom in the ways in which science fiction can depict the human condition. New Model Army is a work that attempts to forge a new way of looking at human events. A mode that seems well suited to this particular time and this particular place and, as a result, the novel has the potential to change things.
Here's hoping.
The Food of the Gods
By Adam Roberts | August 27, 2010
Categories: Book News
Arrived in the post yesterday: the lovely Gollancz SF Masterworks ed of this Wellsian minor masterpiece. It's a lovely cover, even if I'm not entirely sure how it relates to the gigantic subject matter of the novel. (Sings: 'gigantic, gigantic, gigantic'....)
By Light Alone
By Adam Roberts | August 13, 2010
Categories: Book News
This is the (I say: gorgeous) cover art of my next novel, the soliluminescently-titled, By Light Alone, out next year.
I look at it and I think: this may be the most lovely of all my covers.
Dozois-osity
By Adam Roberts | July 20, 2010
Categories: Book News
My contributor copy of Gardner Dozois' prestigious Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection arrived through the door yesterday. It contains my story 'Hair', but very much else besides, and you ought to buy a copy. Oughtn't, you, now.
What Does Nader Elhefnawy Think of New Model Army?
By Adam Roberts | June 30, 2010
Categories: Reviews
It's a good question; and the answer is here, at Strange Horizons: 'Roberts's depiction of the results is quite well thought out in some respects ... Still, the book has its share of implausibilities.' Some point of praise, balanced by points of dispraise.
Most of what has been said so far is in line with Roberts's previous writing, which is distinguished less by sweeping worldbuilding or flashy prose than the relation of character-centered stories against his speculative backdrops. The unreliable, problematic and sometimes rather unlikable (but believable) narrator; the thematic concern with freedom (especially freedom inside radically different kinds of political community); a touch of the epic in the treatment (despite this particular book's comparative brevity, at 288 widely spaced pages) are all familiar as well. (Indeed, the NMA repeatedly made me think of Gradisil's Uplands in their formative period.)
The same also goes for the awkwardness of the structure, and the periodic self-indulgences. Two-thirds of the way in, the story turns in a sharply different direction, and while what follows caps off and completes the story told thus far, it is still so different in setting, situation, tone, and narration that, despite the set up, there are times when it seems like a different book entirely—indeed, a more ostentatiously "literary" one as the pop cultural references increasingly give way to highbrow allusions, the meditations lengthen, and the sense of the surreal comes to predominate.
Additionally, in this instance, Roberts's effectiveness in painting a portrait of Antony gets in the way of the book's ostensible focus, which is not Antony, but Pantegral. This is not only a question of Antony's limits as an observer, important as these are, but also the implausibilities intrinsic to Pantegral—for all the things that Roberts gets right—and the exploration of the book's central ideas suffers accordingly. Nonetheless, Roberts is skillful enough to make the book proceed as smoothly as can reasonably be hoped for under the circumstances. In fact, his sheer ability to keep the reader turning the pages is fully evident here, and despite the story's flaws, the whole still manages to be well worth the while.
It's an intelligent, thoughtful, well-written review, this; Elhenawy doesn't really like the novel, I think, but he goes out of his way not simply to dismiss it, to try and engage with it on its own terms; and a writer can never say fairer than that. If I have the sense that he doesn't really get the novel, that has certainly more to do with my failure to make the novel get-able than his critical faculties.
On
By Adam Roberts | June 30, 2010
Categories: Reviews
Gord Sellar, over at gordsellar.com, has reviewed On, my second novel, from way back when. It's a long, but (I think) fascinating review, as much a meditation on how to handle one's preconceptions -- including, interestingly, one's positive preconceptions -- when approaching a novel for review. This bit I especially liked:
What I was doing, when reading Roberts, seems a lot clearer to me now when I look again at my comments on Stone, linked above. I was saying, “Tell me a hard-SF story written with wonderful literary sensibility.” It’s like picking up Analog and saying, “Make me weep with passionate sympathy for the misunderstood narrator of this small personal story from a world overturned by technological change.”
Okay, okay, I rarely go out looking for a good weep, but the clear priorities that shape stories in Analog are a poor match for the things I go out looking for in stories, most of the time. However, this was why I was always so puzzled about my response to Roberts’ work. After all: I wanted good characterization. I wanted lovely, stylish prose. I wanted some intellectual challenges, and some philosophical dilemmas to wrestle with. Roberts had all of these things in spades. How come I always emerged from his novels finding myself so very frustrated, or at the least so very uneasy?
Well, a good part of it — not all of it, but a good part of it — has to do with the insistences and expectations I was bringing to his work. It was, in large part, because of how I was reading him.
I only see this after having read his 2001 novel On in a different way. I decided to read the novel, which has sat on my shelf for something like four years, after seeing Rich Puchalsky’s review of a completely different novel by Roberts, titled Splinter (a novel I have not yet read). On reading Puchalsky’s review, I was reminded of how compelling a storyteller I’ve always found Roberts despite the things I haven’t liked about his books — of his wonderful style and distinct imagination — and so I decided to pick up On, and then while reading it simply to step out of the way and let Roberts tell me the story he wanted to tell, with the nuances he wanted to polish and shine.
I decided, in other words, to stop insisting that he ought to be some other kind of SF writer, and see what Roberts-as-Roberts had to offer me.
I think part of this especially difficult for me is because I also somehow find myself wanting him to be more like the kind of SF author I want to be when I get around to writing novels. That’s a weird kind of a thing to realize, to look in the face, and I’ll bet if I were I able to chat with Harold Bloom long enough to talk about this weirdness, he’d accuse me of being an Oedipus in search of a daddy to kill — an author anxiously searching for an influence about which to be anxious. Which is pretty weird, because I already have a few pretty good influences, whom I’m pleased to note thus far I have not needed to slay.
I have the least useful perspective on my novels, because I wrote them. Which is a shame, because if it were otherwise, I'd go 'yes!' here. I'm not really like other writers of SF. Since most fans want a new writer to be like their favourite writers of SF, and for good reason; because that's what they enjoy, because it helps them orient themselves with regard to new stuff. Still, I'd be happy to be oedipally slain and superseded in Mr Sellar's SF novel, when it finally comes out.
*Yellow Blue Tibia* has been shortlisted for the 2010 John W. Campbell Memorial Award
By Adam Roberts | June 24, 2010
Categories: Awards
The headline there says it all: I'm absolutely delighted to have been named a finalist for this prestigious award. Just look at the company I'm keeping!
Scotsman on Sunday on SF
By Adam Roberts | June 22, 2010
Categories: Reviews
A very nice piece from Stuart Kelly on New Model Army, Kraken and The Restoration Game (Scotsman on Sunday, June 20 2010):
IF I were to say that these three novels dealt, respectively, with how technology is changing the nature of self and democracy; the politics of belief in the postmodern city; and the ramifications of Bostrom's simulation hypothesis for ethics and the philosophy of being, then you'd be forgiven for thinking this newspaper had turned into Critical Quarterly.Likewise, if I said these three novels were about a "giant" waging war on Basingstoke; the miraculous disappearance of a giant squid; and a computer game about a real but non-existent Soviet state - and the dark goings-on therein - then you'd be equally at liberty to think this was SFX.
This is one of the great ironies of contemporary literature: the books that ask the deepest and most profound questions tend to be situated in the most marginalised of genres. Even writers in the field are tired by the labels and the schisms around them - is this fantasy or sci-fi, steam-punk or alt-history? - and if it weren't for the shelving policy of bookstores, we might as well just call them all literature.
The "giant" in Adam Roberts's New Model Army is called Pantegral, and it's not a single entity. In the near future, new armies have developed through a combination of flash-mobbing, crowd-sourcing and wireless connections. Volunteers - genuine volunteers, not conscripts - come together to achieve objectives, then melt back into "civilian" life as they choose. This radical, freelance and truly democratic army has been hired by the Scottish Government as part of the Succession War: cheekily, Roberts posits a crisis in devolution when Prince William dies, and the Scots and Welsh demand Prince Harry has a paternity test before assuming the role of Prince of Wales. The protagonist tells us in the opening line that he is "not the hero of this story" as, under interrogation, he describes how the New Model Armies work.
The brilliantly detailed concept is balanced by terrific action scenes in the "suburban catastrophe" style of HG Wells or JG Ballard. Every bus stop becomes a fox-hole; each multi-storey car-park a bunker. And Roberts suggests, eerily, that the New Model Army might just be an interim stage as humanity comes to term with its new collective capacity.
Kelly says some equally insightful things about Mievelle and MacLeod.
La Gradisil Française
By Adam Roberts | June 16, 2010
Categories: Book News
Gorgeous new Folio SF edition of Gradisil, as translated into French by the estimable Elisabeth Vonaburg. 800 pages long, too!
On New Model Army
By Adam Roberts | June 16, 2010
Categories: Reviews
Slight haitus around here; apologies for that. I'll try and be more regular, and will start with this splendid review of New Model Army on weRead (courtesy Phil):
On one level, you could see this book as another sci-fi dystopia – and, yes, it’s that – but as ever, the writing is superb, the story construction compelling and the characterisation fulfilling. The opening sentence: “I am not the hero of this story” is true – the NMA itself is the subject, and one can imagine lesser writers taking that and using it as a pretext for hopping from one character to another, painting none of them, all in the name of focussing on the subject matter. Adam Roberts gives his narrating character a full history, personality and motive for his actions whilst still making the NMA itself the hero of the story. I’ve read all Adam Roberts’ novels and they really are superb. Some of them are less accessible than others (‘On’ and ‘Polystom’ are seriously weird!) but from Gradisil onwards he seems to be retaining his hallmark skill of taking a single unusual concept and wrapping it into a novel of outstanding quality. Reading a book as good as New Model Army one cannot help but rail against the ignorance of the literary classes that eschew Adam Roberts (and Kim Stanley Robinson) whilst heaping praise on Margaret Atwood just because she has managed to convince the book world that she’s not a science fiction writer (she is) because science fiction writers don’t write ‘proper novels.’ All three produce first class novels as good as anything Hilary Mantel or Salman Rushdie has ever written. One can but hope that this will be recognised one day.
One can indeed but-hope.
Pandora SF und Fantasy 04
By Adam Roberts | May 13, 2010
Categories: Book News
Dropped through my letter-box yesterday: a contributors copy of the latest Pandora. It includes an article by me on Philip K Dick called 'Der obszohne Klecks auf Ihrem Engramm". The content's page follows that article title with 'von Adam Roberts', which presumably means I've joined the German artistocracy. Excellent!
Cool John Howe cover, though, what? And this issue also includes pieces by Elizabeth Hand, John Clute and Roger Luckhurst, so I'm in good company.
Keith Brooke, The Unlikely World of Faraway Frankie
By Adam Roberts | May 11, 2010
Categories: Book News
My contributor copies for this title arrived from Ian Whates' Newcon Press last week (I wrote the short introduction). It's an excellent novel too; certainly one of the very best things this talented author has yet done. If you know what's good for you, you'll want to buy a copy, although the title's amazon page says 'Temporarily out of stock'. I hope because they've sold out, but probably it's because they won't order any in until people start buying it ... so what are you waiting for? Alternately you might want to try the publishers directly.
I notice that Tony Ballantyne agrees with me on this one.
SFX
By Adam Roberts | May 10, 2010
Categories: Events and Appearances
The latest, which is to say the 196th issue of SFX (out now, in May; so obviously the cover says the issue is 'July 2010') contains a lot of interesting things. But there's also an interview with me, mostly given over to me talking twitter, plus this slightly muppet-faced photo of me sitting on the steps outside my house.
I'm joking! Of course that's not my house! Actually, it's the shed at the bottom of my garden.
Monday 10 May Piccadilly Waterstones 5:30pm
By Adam Roberts | May 9, 2010
Categories: Events and Appearances
The SFX Summer of SF Reading
Stephen Hunt Adam Roberts, Dan Abnett Graham McNeill, China Mieville Michael CobleyWATERSTONE'S PICCADILLY
Monday, 10 May 2010, 5:30PM
To celebrate the launch of The SFX Summer of SF Reading we are delighted to host authors from the across the [sic] SF spectrum. Access to the queue is on a first come first served basis, please arrive early to avoid disappointment. The duration of signing is discretionary. To win tickets to an exclusive post signing event please goto http://www.futurecomps.co.uk/sfxevening.Further details: 020 7851 2400
Guardian Review
By Adam Roberts | May 8, 2010
Categories: Reviews
I knew there was going to be a very short piece by me in today's Guardian Review about Terry Pratchett's Who-related ruminations. I knew that because I wrote the piece on Wednesday (though it doesn't appear to be online ...) What I didn't know, and didn't expect, was that the Guardian would carry the following Keith Brooke review of the mass-market paperback release of Yellow Blue Tibia:
It's a simple solution: the war is over and we need a new enemy, so ask a bunch of science fiction writers to invent an invading alien race that will spur us on to technological advance and unite the people. In thsi novel that is exactly what Stalin does in the mid-1940s. Konstantin Skvorecky is one of the writers Stalin recruited and then spurned, and one of the only survivors 40 years on. He lives a quiet life, unnoticed until the world he and his colleagues created starts to come true. What follows is a convoluted -- sometimes frsutratingly so -- puzzle of a story, continually wrongfooting the reader on a road-trip to Chernobyl in the fateful year of 1986. The novel is both thriller and mind-game, involving alternate histories, the KGB, UFOs, and even Scientology, with the author at his playful best. Putting a bunch of SF authors together to write the future wasn't really a simple solution. Nothing ever is with Roberts, who combines intellectual challenge and entertainment as few others can.
I didn't expect it because Eric Brown already reviewed the book in the paper when it came out. Still, very pleased to be double-reviewed, and so positively too!
Forbidden Planet Signing May 13th
By Adam Roberts | May 5, 2010
Categories: Events and Appearances
Forbidden Planet, but not forbidden to you. You're more than welcome to come along:
Forbidden Planet and Gollancz publishing are delighted to bring you one of our now-celebrated, open-format, multi-author signings! At 6pm on Thursday May 13th, Forbidden Planet 179 Shaftesbury Avenue, London will be playing host to: -• Stephen Deas
• M D Lachlan
• John Meaney
• Sarah Pinborough
• Adam RobertsThis is a free-form and open signing, bringing the authors out from behind their tables and giving their readers a chance to meet them and talk to them about their work. An array of fantastic books will be on hand to be picked up and signed – including works by every one of the writers present.
Come!
New Model Army signing
By Adam Roberts | May 4, 2010
Categories: Book News, Events and Appearances, Reviews
I'll be signing copies of New Model Army at Waterstones in High Wycombe, on Saturday the 15th May from 11am. Unaccountably, High Wycombe somehow escaped the depredations of my NMA in the novel itself, although nearby Maidenhead gets hammered. Perhaps the good citizens of High Wycombe wish to thank me for sparing their borough ...?
There have been some other reviews. I was particularly pleased with this David Hebblethwaite review:
I can safely say that New Model Army is like no other book I’ve ever read. I know this because I have no name for the feeling I was left with after I’d finished it. That’s a recommendation, by the way.
That's exactly what I'm trying to do when I write fiction!
Clarke result
By Adam Roberts | May 4, 2010
Categories: Awards
... and the winner was: Miéville's The City and the City, as if you didn't know. Ah well: it's a superb novel.
The ceremony was as it always is: good to see lots of people there, meet old friends and put faces to a couple of internet names. Stephen Hunt reports that Sean Pertwee was there:
The actor Sean Pertwee – aka Mutant Chronicles, Doomsday, Equilibrium, Dog Soldiers, and the upcoming The 4th Reich – was sitting directly in front of me, close to China Miéville on the left of the cinema auditorium during the ceremony. I suspect he was there as part of the SCIFI London Film Festival, the kind hosts of the Clarke awards for the last three years ... As the thanks to the organisations supplying the judges were made, Tom Hunter, head awards honcho, gets through thanking the SF Foundation and the BSFA, it comes to SFcrowsnest.com’s turn and said web site’s ace judge Paul Skevington, then Sean Pertwee leans forward to his mate and I am fairly sure he whispered, ‘Who the £$%£ are SFcrowsnest?’
As it happens, I was sat next to China at this point in the proceedings, and beside Pertwee's mate (whom I did not recognise and whose name I don't know) and Pertwee himself. I suspect they were there as friends of Marcel Theroux, who was sitting in the row in front. I suspect this because, as a slide flashed on the enormous screen showing all six shortlised novels, Sean Pertwee's mate leant over to me (a man he didn't know from Adam, if you'll pardon the phrase) and whispered loudly in my ear: 'Far North's a genius novel. All those others, though, are shit.' I murmured something noncommitally agreeable, and the ceremony moved on.
What Stephen doesn't mention is that at one point John Landis, I'm almost certain it was, poked his head over the divide separating the exit from the auditorium, and that Pertwee and his mate both waved excitedly to him.
Clarke Award tonight
By Adam Roberts | April 28, 2010
Categories: Awards
Very exciting. For the record, I predict a win for either Miéville or Jones, with Robinson running a good race and coming up on the right hand side. I haven't yet got around to reading Far North, so can't say whether it does or doesn't have a chance, or does or doesn't deserve the prize on merits. But I've read the other five, and that means I know that it's an unusually strong shortlist this year. Which is a little frustrating ... why do I have to get shortlisted alongside so many superb novels? Why can't the list be my book and five pisspoor, makeweight titles? Although, of course, not really: if I do not win tonight (and I don't expect to) then losing to a pisspoor rival would be much worse than losing to books of the brilliance of Miéville's or Jones's or Robinson's.
They're strange occasions, these awards. To slip into the third-person: one tries not to get too worked up about them, or to lose too much of one's cool; but inevitably things becomes increasingly exciting and jitter-provoking the closer to the actual announcement one gets. By the time you're at the fumbling-open-the-gold-envelope part, you're no longer thinking 'oo I hope I win!' You're thinking 'let's get this over with.' Those screenshots of the Oscars with five separate boxes and an anxious star in each? When the winner is announced, and the other four furiously applaud, they're not being disingenuous, you know. Perhaps they really are graceful losers, or perhaps they will, later, seethe with resentment; but in the moment they're experiencing a rush of pure relief that manifests as real happiness for the other actor.
On the upside, there have been some more reviews of all the shortlisted titles, some of them (the reviews I mean) very interesting. Niall Harrison, that tall man, links to some of these; and here's Dan Hartland's whole shortlist review at SH (and part II). He's not so keen on YBT, as it goes, though he says some interesting and perceptive things about the novel nonetheless. And I can't argue with his main point: he looks for an aesthetic unity in his fiction (he says he has 'a kink for it'); where I, although I acknowlege the tremendous gravitational appeal of that sort of unity, mistrust it, and consider it one of my jobs as a writer to go through the balanced, harmonious whole fucking it up in various, and I would hope creative, ways. That's a differend, right there.
One small niggle I have. Hartland:
There is also the Russian question. In a post on her own blog, the novelist Catherynne Valente charged Roberts with egregious cultural appropriation, marshalling several arguments in order to show that the novel's grasp on Russian and Soviet culture is tenuous and at times wholly wrong-headed. Some examples are less serious than others—that Skvorecky, when arrested by the KGB, angrily (but impotently) demands he has rights, is surely more forgivable than the suggestion that the genre and literary circles depicted in the novel might bear no relation to their counterparts in reality.
Nitpicking with statements like is really of no interest to anybody but a particular breed of pedantry-minded author (which is why I bury this at the bottom of a post few will read, rather than weighing in on Hartland's unpedantic, thoughtful piece); but this isn't right. What I mean is: I don't argue with Catherynne Valente's dislike of the novel; for maybe it is as shit as she says, and certainly her reaction is inalienably hers. And if I read her correctly, although that dislike does come in part from a sense that 'the novel's grasp on Russian and Soviet culture is tenuous and at times wholly wrong-headed', it really has more to do with a broader dislike of the book's tone and approach together with a diagnosis of deplorable fatphobia in my imagination. But I have to say: this particular bit isn't right. Though Valente and Hartland both say he does, Skvorecky, does not angrily (but impotently) demand his rights when arrested by the KGB. It's true that he does, after lengthy interrogation by several Militia (not KGB) officers, ask with what he has been charged; but that's not the same thing. Asking the police 'what are the charges?', even in a tyrannical state, isn't so unbelievable as demanding the KGB respect one's human rights, I think.
New Model Reviews
By Adam Roberts | April 20, 2010
Categories: Reviews
A few reviews of New Model Army have appeared. This is what Brigid Cherry at Total SciFi Online has to say:
Roberts’ intriguing and spectacular work is less a novel than a philosophical treatise. If that sounds like a turn-off, it certainly shouldn’t be, for New Model Army is written in stunning prose that is often lyrical, if not poetic. Roberts has a wonderful grasp of language and uses it to stunning effect on every page.
Keith Brooke didn't like it so much, in the Guardian:
The year is 2030 and Tony Block is fighting for Pantegral, a New Model Army hired by the secessionist Scottish government to fight against their English oppressors. Block, a gay English intellectual, is a mercenary fighting for the cause of democracy: the NMA is truly democratic, a band of free-thinkers with no command structure. Their opponents are the British army and, as Bloch sees it, the outmoded, hierarchical, feudal English political system. Much of the narrative charts the running battles with the conventional army, the NMA's resounding victories, and Bloch's love for his straight companion-in-arms Simic. But this is a novel by Adam Roberts, intellectual enfant terrible of British SF, and he transforms what might have been a conventional war story into a series of investigations into the nature of democracy, love, war and, ultimately, revolution. The result is frequently revelatory but also bafflingly self-indulgent.
And Jason Baki over at his estimable Kamvision blog, is positive:
I found New Model Army to be funny, tragic, infuriating, completely self absorbed; and yet by turn acutely self aware. A rare thing happened to me with this book, and I can think of no higher praise: as soon as I finished it, I actually wanted to re-read it. The more I thought about it after I completed it, the more I liked it. This is a fantastic piece of contemporary writing: edgy, relevant and strangely moving. I highly recommend it to those who like to be challenged as well as entertained.
And here's another thing: Jason sent me some perceptive questions, and I responded by email, and the result is called 'an interview'. You'll find that at his blog too.
Clarke Award Shortlisting for YBT
By Adam Roberts | March 31, 2010
Categories: Awards
I am absolutely delighted to be shortlisted for this year's Arthur C Clarke Award.
Spirit by Gwyneth Jones
The City & The City by China Miéville
Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts
Galileo's Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson
Far North by Marcel Theroux
Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding
As I was saying to somebody else, the thing that makes me particularly chuffed about appearing on this list is the sheer excellence of the other nominees. It means that my happiness at being shortlisted in the first place is tempered by a kind of relief -- there'll be, for me, neither shame, envy nor sorrow if I lose to a book the calibre of Galileo's Dream, Spirit or The City and the City.' To quote Woody Allen's Love and Death, as I am fond of doing: 'no, it's a greater honour for me ...'
New Model Army
By Adam Roberts | March 27, 2010
Categories: Book News
In the post this morning: the first two of my author copies of New Model Army (available from all good internet bookshops and so on and so forth). Very handsome volume; good cover, nice type, sits lovely in the hand. I opened it at random on p.128 and found a typo in the first line, which, I choose to believe, is one of those omens like William the Conqueror falling over when he got off the boat at Pevensey -- which is to say, by this typo I seize England with both hands! Certainly, looking through, I can't find any other typos; and the omen is given force by the fact that, as it happens, p127 is the page where the book stops being 'a good book' and starts being 'a really good book.' The best I've written, I think (though what do I know, etc).
On the other hand, Gollancz have chosen not to go with my preferred strapline: 'If Nabokov had written Bravo Two Zero ...' Probably wisely.
Yellow Blue Tibia in the 2009 BSC Book Tournament
By Adam Roberts | March 22, 2010
Categories: Book News
BSCreview.com email me to tell me that Yellow Blue Tibia is one of 64 books selected to be voted on in their book tournament for the best new genre release of the year 2009. You can see the details of the tournament here. 'We invite you,' they say, 'to encourage your fans to come vote in the tournament on your blog.' So here I am.
A thousand schools of thought contend
By Adam Roberts | March 1, 2010
Categories: Book News
This site has been lacking hard news of late; a state of affairs which is about to change. But before it does, a few more boat-trips around the island called The Contemporary Reputation of Yellow Blue Tibia. On the one hand, it's been voted (I'm very pleased) one of sfsite's top 10 titles of the year. Even the estimable Abigail Nussbaum, whom I thought didn't like the novel very much, thinks enough of it to squeeze it on the bottom of her Hugo ballot, which as flattering and pointless gestures goes is one of the best. My cup runneth over, or would do if the cup didn't have an ego-deflating Catherynne M. Valente-shaped hole in its base: for it turns out her dislike of the novel was very intense indeed.
YBT on BSFA Award Shortlist
By Adam Roberts | February 6, 2010
Categories: Awards
I'm more chuffed than a chaffinch (who, I assume, are so-called from their enormous capacity for chuffed-ness) that Yellow Blue Tibia has been shortlisted for the BSFA award. Best of all, just look at the stratospheric calibre of the other three titles! That's pretty pleasing company to be keeping, I don't mind telling you.
‘Hair’
By Adam Roberts | January 2, 2010
Categories: Book News
Gardner Dozois has selected my story 'Hair' for The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection (due out July 2010). I'm chuffed. 'Hair' originally appeared in Geoff Ryman's superlative When It Changed anthology of original fiction. Why don't you buy a copy?
A Note on Cheryl Morgan
By Adam Roberts | January 2, 2010
Categories: Reviews
Back in the days when she ran Emerald City Cheryl Morgan read and reviewed some of my writing. She didn't like it, for a number of perfectly valid reasons, which is, of course, fair enough. The thing is: for many readers that would have drawn the line under any further encounter with what I do. There's no shortage of books published, after all, and enough great writers (certainly better than I) continue to produce the sort of thing she does like to mean that she could easily have decided never to trouble herself with one of my books again. So when I met Cheryl at Finncon last year, and she told me that she had read and enjoyed Yellow Blue Tibia, I was very pleasantly surprised indeed: not just that she liked the book, but to discover that she was not to sort of reader to deal in rigid categories of 'I only like X' and 'I don't and never shall like Y'. There are plenty, in and out of genre, who think that way, but -- evidently -- not her. Since then, and given that I went on to say a number of disobliging things about 2009's Hugo shortlists (Cheryl, quite apart from winning Hugos herself, is an important figure in many SFF cons, Worldcon not least), I would have forgiven her had she chosen to keep her positive opinion of my novel to herself. But that would be to underestimate her. The following paragraph was part of her summing up of the best of 2009:
Kim Stanley Robinson caused a bit of a stir this year when he wrote in The Guardian that he thought the Booker Prize should have been won by Adam Roberts’ Yellow Blue Tibia. “Adam who?” said the literati in unison, though they forgot so quickly that when the BBC caught up with the story they managed to mention the book without mentioning poor Adam’s name. I’m not sure that it is quite a Booker winner, but it is by far the best thing Adam has ever done. Just remember that he’s a British satirist, and such people earn their living by mercilessly pillorying others.
Now go and read her blog.
Black Static on Scrooge
By Adam Roberts | January 2, 2010
Categories: Book News
Black Static is a fine magazine. Here's what Peter Tennant says about I Am Scrooge in the latest ed:
For his latest trick, respected critic and SF author Adam Roberts has great fun producing a pastiche of Dickens's seasonal classic, A Christmas Carol, and the horror afficionado and more general reader will find much to enjoy between the covers of I Am Scrooge, not least the tasteful line drawings of Zom Leech.
I'll pass those words on to Zom. He'll be chuffed.
At first I found this book rather forced and the language slightly stilted, with an uncomfortable tension between the scenes of graphic violence and the spirit of the source material, but the story grew on me as it progressed, the lilting cadences of the mock-Dickensian preose insinuating themselves into my consciousness and soon all objections were swept aside. Roberts ... [is] not a writer to engage the emotions, but he does delight the intellect with a wealth of invention and incidental detail, along the way having huge fun with the tropes of the zombie genre. ... A particular pleasure is Roberts' reinvention of the Christmas story, gifting us with a version in which the Slaughter of the Innocents had to do with stopping a zombie plague and Christmas puddings are a sweetmeat reminder of the brains which zombies love to eat. It's an audacious display of twisted logic, coupled with sly wit, as each detail is neatly slotted into the overall pattern and the feeling takes hold that yes, insane as it sounds, this all makes sense and could have happened exactly as Roberts describes it. Zombies are flavour of the month just now in publishing circles, whilst the success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies has carved out a niche for reiterations of the classics. I Am Scrooge shows up that work as the rather dull text it actually was, demonstrating what can be done when you apply intelligence and invention and wit to subvert a classic story instead of simply adding a dollop or two of schlock to the mix. It's also, aside from a few typos (unusual for Gollancz) a very nicely produced book, and at the asking price will make a perfect stocking filler ... that will continue to bring the odd chuckle and pleasurable frisson long after the turkey is eaten and the Queen's speech forgotten.
Twenty ten
By Adam Roberts | January 2, 2010
Categories: Blogging, Chitchat
What's coming? A couple of things, since you ask. New Model Army is published on the 10th of April. I'd say it is the best thing I have ever written, and by quite a wide margin too. That may, of course, not be saying very much; but it's a big deal for me.
I'll be appearing at the Scarborough Literary Festival on Saturday 17th April (at 1 pm to be precise, with Tom Holt and Peter Guttridge; but otherwise just knocking about that fine town). I don't often do festivals or cons, so this is also quite a big deal for me. I'll need to get the train up and everything.
A note on my blogging: one New Year's Resolution of mine is to complete the Hugo translation I've been engaged in, off and on, for ages now. It has lain idle for half a year, but I shall restart it. Also, I've rethought Punkadiddle. I've removed the occasional pictures that appeared there, leaving it as a pure reviews blog. I don't have enough blogs, so I've set up another one, Tin Pics, on which to post any sketches or drawings or tinny little pictures I come up with; but I don't expect anybody to follow that, except, perhaps, those members of my immediate family whom I sketch. And even then will probably be uninterested in my Hugo doings. Which is all fair enough.
Paul Cornell is a tall, powerfully-built stallion of a man
By Adam Roberts | December 14, 2009
Categories: Blogging
...with a brain the size of a cement-mixer and taste so impeccable no pecca would come within two thousand miles of it. You can see that this from reading his blog:
My three favourite novels of the year were probably Moxyland by Lauren Beukes, Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts and Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi (going by UK publication dates, that is) ... Yellow Blue Tibia is from that interesting place where a new inflationary universe of SF has sprung up, amongst literary fiction. Some of that universe is formed by literary authors who look down on our ghetto and despise it, and some is formed by literary authors who simply don't see why they should enter a ghetto and prostrate themselves just to write about what they like. Adam Roberts, aside from both groups, is an SF writer who can decide, like Aldiss, Ballard, Priest and most of the others from the New Wave, to use the tropes of a literary novel, ambiguity most of all, to enter that universe himself. He's been, frankly, arrogant in the way he told this year's Hugo nominated authors (and artists, even!) that their work wasn't cutting edge enough. But that doesn't change the fact that he deserves more recognition, and that perhaps the SF ghetto should reach out more to embrace that new universe, and redefine, a little, its terms of engagement with literary quality. Yellow Blue Tibia is a wonderful collision between the Soviet way of seeing the world, the SF way of doing that, and the universe of flying saucers. It keeps its foot in the SF genre, right at the end, by offering not a dreamlike wandering off from its road trip through the Russian consciousness, but a nuts and bolts explanation, which might come as a bit of a shock to a literary audience expecting something more like The Magus or Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow. But who knows, they might have liked that shock, they might want more, and we should welcome them with more, and more like this from Adam Roberts.Previous Entries