Category Archive: Book News
Previous EntriesGuardian on Swiftly
Sunday, April 13th, 2008Eric 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 [...]
Celebration
Friday, April 11th, 2008In 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.
Tags: short fiction
Deathray on Swiftly
Sunday, March 30th, 2008I'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 [...]
SFX on Swiftly
Friday, March 28th, 2008Richard 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, [...]
Gevers judges Swifters
Saturday, March 22nd, 2008Nick 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, [...]
More Swiftly reviews
Thursday, March 13th, 2008SFRevue 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 [...]
Swiftly reviews
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008Dan 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 [...]
French Gradisil
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008Ceci 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, [...]
Vector on Headless
Sunday, January 27th, 2008Discouraging 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 [...]
Philip K Dick Award Shortlisting for Gradisil
Wednesday, January 9th, 2008I'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 [...]
Paul Raven on Headless
Monday, December 17th, 2007At 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 [...]
Conceptual Breakthrough
Wednesday, November 21st, 2007Not 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 [...]
Korean Jameson
Friday, November 9th, 2007Nice 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 [...]
November
Monday, November 5th, 2007An 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 [...]
Strange Horizons on Headless, Splinter
Monday, October 15th, 2007A 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 [...]
Swiftly
Saturday, September 22nd, 2007This 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 [...]
What does Australia think of Headless?
Tuesday, September 18th, 2007This:
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 [...]
Guardian on Splinter
Saturday, September 15th, 2007The 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 [...]
Give me sf-prize or give me death …
Monday, September 10th, 2007I 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 [...]
Deathray on Splinter
Wednesday, September 5th, 2007Deathray 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 [...]
Infinity Plus Anthology
Friday, August 24th, 2007
Nice fat contributor's-copy of Keith Brooke and Nick Gever's excellent Infinity Plus: the Anthology arrived by post this very morning. A lovely yellow, with planets and boulders and whatnot seemingly bubbling up inside a cosmic glass of Heineken. 686-pages, including my story 'Swiftly', all for under a tenner. 'A ground-breaking collection of science fiction stories [...]
disLOCATIONS
Tuesday, August 14th, 2007One title sitting on the mat and waiting for me was this one: a handsome little volume edited by Ian Whates and containing stories by ... well you can see the list of names there, at the bottom. My story is called 'Remorse', and is short and clever; but there are several really excellent pieces [...]
Deathray on Headless: it’s Clever, Unfortunately
Wednesday, July 25th, 2007Deathray you ask? Deathray I say. Guy Haley reviews the novel, and his tagline is: 'Newly headless pompous poet wends painful way to self-discovery in picaresque SF tale that is, at time, too clever by half.' Quite right too: no place for cleverness in SF. Vile quality.
Tricky, tricky Mr Roberts. He's a tough one to [...]
Swift! Orwell! Atwood! Roberts …
Wednesday, July 11th, 2007“Land of the Headless is a darkly satirical tale that extrapolates an absurd idea into something weirdly plausible. This is not escapist adventure but a dystopian vision in the tradition of Swift, Orwell and Atwood against the cruellest extremes of human stupidity.”
THE TIMES
‘... grotesque satire of religious fundamentalism. Thoroughly engrossing . . . deeply affecting [...]
Locus on Headless
Tuesday, July 10th, 2007Nick Gevers, LOCUS:
The SF novels of Adam Roberts invariably centre on jaw-dropping concepts extrapolated to wonderful, and satirical extremes. There is no doubting the cumulative power of his work, its aspiring strangeness and neatly calculated absurdist brio. Consider the premise of Roberts’s latest book Land of the Headless . . . a brilliant burlesque conceit, and [...]
Saturday Telegraph Headless review
Wednesday, July 4th, 2007Short enough to be quoted in full, Andrew McKie's Telegraph review of Land of the Headless from Saturday 30th June (also, by pleasant synchronicity, my birthday):
Land of the Headless is billed as ‘a simple story’. This might not be your first thought as you read the tale of a man who is beheaded for adultery [...]
June Book Arrivals
Saturday, June 16th, 2007Earlier this week my author copies of Land of the Headless arrived at the house; I unpacked them from their box and stacked them on the table and they look as handsome in the towering mass as they do individually.
And this morning, the postman rang the doorbell to hand-over a smaller parcel, containing five copies [...]
Catch-up 3
Monday, June 4th, 2007Third of four, to report on my forthcoming Gollancz novel, Land of the Headless. Here it is:
It's Its due-date is 21st June 2007, a date I am confident will hereafter be known around the world as International Headless Day.
Tags: Headless
Catch-up 2
Tuesday, May 29th, 2007
Splinter will be appearing later this year. It's based upon this fine volume:
It should, indeed, be possible to buy a special limited edition box-set including both Splinter and a revamped and retooled English translation of Verne's Hector Servadac when the book is finally published. More on this closer to the date.
Solaris, the publishers in this case, are [...]
Catch-up 1
Saturday, May 26th, 2007After so long a period of desuetude I suppose I ought to provide a couple of catch-up posts. Let you know what's new, and what's been happening so far in 2007. And today the catch-up concerns Gradisil.
Following its 2006 UK publication Gradi was picked up by the top-drawer US press Pyr, and published over there with the following superb cover [...]