I look at it and I think: this may be the most lovely of all my covers.

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.

I notice that Tony Ballantyne agrees with me on this one.

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!

On the other hand, Gollancz have chosen not to go with my preferred strapline: 'If Nabokov had written Bravo Two Zero ...' Probably wisely.

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.

Until then, I've been noting with pleasure a couple of zombie reviews. Hard, for instance, to think of a more elevating and honourable point of comparison than I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again:

Imagine a historical Shaun of the Dead written with as many bad zombie puns as you can think of – if you’ve got a long memory, add that it’s been written by the I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again team – and you’ve got an idea of the tone. The narrator’s voice occasionally irritates, with one joke repeated a few too many times, but once the plot kicks in, it’s far more in the background. Given that Roberts is a professor of 19th Century literature, it’s hardly surprising that there are multiple references to different stories, some well-known, others obscure. Like Monty Python at its best though, I Am Scrooge doesn’t talk down to its audience – even when it’s about to make possibly the worst Scooby Doo joke ever! [Paul Simpson]

And here's what the Daily Mail thought:

One man stands between Victorian London and a plague of brain-munching undead: Ebeneezer Scrooge. Yep, it’s that Dickensian zombie novel Eng Lit so obviously lacked. In what you could call a fairly free adaptation, Adam Roberts reworks A Christmas Carol into a zombie-slashing gore-fest, with cameo appearances by Jack the Ripper, Queen Victoria and Dickens himself, plus a bravura performance by the Ghost of Christmas Future as a very funny Ali G-soundalike, Lots of corny jokes and groanworthy one-liners, lots and lots of brain-slurping zombies. Clever and daft in equal measure. [Harry Ritchie, Daily Mail 30 Oct 2009]

British science fiction is now in a golden age.

I say this as a happy fan and an awed colleague: the range, depth, intensity, wit and beauty of the science fiction being published in the UK these days is simply amazing. The eight wonderful writers featured here are only a representative sampling of a community of artists so strong that it is hard to explain. Add to these Brian Aldiss, Neal Asher, Iain Banks, Christopher Evans, Alasdair Gray, Colin Greenland, John Courtenay Grimwood, Peter Hamilton, Nick Harkaway, M. John Harrison, Robert Holdstock, Gwyneth Jones, Garry Kilworth, Doris Lessing, Ian R. MacLeod, China Miéville, Richard Morgan, Christopher Priest, Alastair Reynolds, Adam Roberts, Jennifer Rohn, Brian Stableford, Charles Stross, Lisa Tuttle - and no doubt others I have forgotten, or am unaware of (sorry) - and one has to ask, how is it that a group of such intellectual power could be working at one time, and our time at that.

I was enormously chuffed to see my name in there, part of that genuinely exalted company. Now, if somebody staged a four way hike-off between Robinson, Le Guin, Delany and Gene Wolfe for the title 'world's greatest living science fiction author' I'd put my money on Robinson; something that only made the name-check sweeter. But then I turned the page.

Oh, I know there is a Booker prize, I've heard of it even in California - supposedly given to the best fiction published in the Commonwealth every year - but there are no Woolves on those juries, and so they judge in ignorance and give their awards to what usually turn out to be historical novels. Sometimes these are fine historical novels, written by tremendous writers; I particularly like Roddy Doyle, John Banville, Vikram Seth and Amitav Ghosh, and my favorite was Penelope Fitzgerald. But working, like all of us, in the rain shadow of the great modernists, they tend to do the same things the modernists did in smaller ways. A good new novel about the first world war, for instance, is still not going to tell us more than Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford. More importantly, these novels are not about now in the way science fiction is. Thus it seems to me that three or four of the last 10 Booker prizes should have gone to science fiction novels the juries hadn't read. Should I name names? Why not: Air by Geoff Ryman should have won in 2005, Life by Gwyneth Jones in 2004, and Signs of Life by M. John Harrison in 1997. Indeed this year the prize should probably go to a science fiction comedy called Yellow Blue Tibia, by Adam Roberts.

At which point I fell off my chair.

Fifty Key Figures in Science Fiction (Routledge Key Guides) (Paperback)
by Mark Bould (Author), et al. RRP: £14.99

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If it weren't for that extra shipping charge ...

I have a picture of a Finnmug to share; but am having trouble getting the image posted. Before the end of the week, though, surely.

I finished a working draft of my next novel, to be called New Model Army: at the minute my editor has it, and I've also sent it to three of the most deftly expert novel-readers I know, who have, with fantastic kindness, all agreed to have a read too. In the light of their feedback I shall revise.

The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF (which I'm in, and which I praised here) has been the occasion of a heated SFSignal thread. Commentors noted that all the contributors are white men. This is, clearly, not good. Some commentators attempted a defence of this aspect of the collection, which in turn inflamed the tempers of other commentators, and it all became rather shouty. My view is bound to be a little compromised by virtue of the fact that I have a story in the volume; but in many respects it is close to what Al Reynolds (also a contributor) says. Like him, when Mike Ashley approached me to see if I wanted to contribute a story, I had no idea who else was being asked, or what the overall collection would look like.

You should read the whole thread, really; it's interesting, if often intemperate. So: I believe there should be more diversity in published SF, especially in terms of gender and non-white ethnicity. It's a shame this anthology doesn't do that; but the claims of several of the more choleric contributors don't seem to me tenable, specifically (a) accusations that Mike Ashley is sexist, or actively misogynist: I really don't believe he is; and (b) the belief that this anthology deserves to be held up for particular rebuke (instead of, let's say, the 2009 Hugo best novel shortlist) because it claims to be in some sense representative of SF. I don't think it does; not even in terms of the cover tagline's characteristic publishing-hyperbole (I don't know if the editor was responsible for this tagline anyway; probably not).

Actually, I think Jonathan M's first comment (also on that thread) may be closer to the truth: the problem isn't this anthology as such, it's a more generalised sexism and racism in SF publishing; and the point of getting so angry here, and of throwing so much vitriol around, is to turn this book into a deterrent case: to make future editors think twice. I can see some merit in that, although it seems to me hard that Ashley, a decent and conscientious man, must have this torrent of anger poured onto his head. It also seems to me a shame that Paul di Filippo gets so roasted in the thread, given that he is to the best of my knowledge neither a sexist nor a racist: his attempt at genial 'let's all calm down' commenting sparked some furious and indeed frumious responses. One interesting thing to come out of it, though, was a specific suggestion from Reynolds: a genuine ethical question that I am currently pondering ... should authors who are approached to contribute to anthologies make their agreement conditional on the finished product including an appropriate diversity of other authors? I wonder how that would work, practically: whether it falls within an author's responsibility; whether, indeed, it would tag the author in question as 'difficult' and reduce future commissions; and whether that would be a price worth paying for the larger good. What isn't discussed in that thread, and indeed can't be since, by their own admission, most of the people commenting neither have nor ever (on principle) will read the stories it includes, is literary quality. That seems to me high, although my judgment is of course, as noted, of course problematised by the fact that I'm also a contributor.

Christmas? I know, I know; we're only just into July. It went like this:

ZOMBIE EDITOR: We here at Zombie Publishing feel there aren't enough zombies in literature today. BRAAAAAIII...
ME: I see.
ZOMBIE EDITOR: ...IIINNNS! and accordingly we were wondering if you might BRAAAAAIIIINSS! write us a little stocking-filler book for the Christmas market; Dickens's A Christmas Carol, with added Zombies. Yes?
ME: By all means. Given that this won't be out until Christmas, and that Christmas is a long long way away, when will you need me to deliver the manuscript?
ZOMBIE EDITOR: MAAAAAAAAAY!
ME: I'd better get cracking then.
ZOMBIE EDITOR: Do you mean cracking in the sense of cracking open peoples' skulls in order to get at their BRAAAAIIINS? Or in the sense of moving swiftly along with the writing, hilarity and drawing the illustrations?
ME: The latter.
ZOMBIE EDITOR: Fair enough.

And here's the cover. I particularly like the bloodstained thumbprints.

the first thing that struck me while I read Adam Roberts’ “Yellow Blue Tibia” is how realistic is described the Communism times of that period. Well, there are small differences with what happened in my country, but the general line is quite the same. Adam Roberts builds an atmosphere close to reality and often throughout the reading “Yellow Blue Tibia” feels like a historical fiction or an alternative history. Although the novel has strong Science Fiction elements and a Sci-Fi plot and it would seem that these are lost in the story they are lingering in the background until the second half of the novel when they’ll come forth in full. I also absolutely loved the humor of “Yellow Blue Tibia”. Throughout the novel Adam Roberts creates amusing scenes, each one brightening my day and ripping a burst of laugh from me. Besides the amusing scenes there are dialogues that are delicious to read and savor and I find the dialogues between the main character, Konstantin Andreiovich Skvorecki, and the taxi driver Saltykov to be the cherry on the cake ... “Yellow Blue Tibia” is one novel I wished it didn’t end

British science fiction is currently undergoing one of its periodic bursts of creativity. Adam Roberts and Ian McDonald, two of the leading SF authors, certainly don't lack for imagination.

Good! Steele calls YBT:

...an SF mystery, involving UFOs and Scientology, a comedy of the Absurd in a Gogol-like satire of the Russian bureaucracy, and a multiverse "quantum alternatives that radiated" conclusion. ... Philip K Dick would have been proud of Roberts with the latter's hint that maybe the 20th century was only an invention!.

Philip K Dick would have been proud. If that's not the highest praise, I don't know what is.

The world portrayed in Yellow Blue Tibia is an illimitable palimpsest of versions of the world, just like all the SF stories ever written heaped one upon another; the world is a Book (on page 251, Roberts says as much, says that Yellow Blue Tibia is the book in which Yellow Blue Tibia happens); if we are lucky (as Skvorecky eventually is), we adhere to a page of the world that allows us to llive, but if we are less fortunate we reality-shift (as Skvorecky did until he fixes on one place) through the tissue-thin but innumerable Thought Experiments of the Prestidigitator, who may be UFOs this time.

It is (I feel awkward saying this, because it happens to be a positive review of my novel) an unusually good, if spoiler-high, piece of writing. As one of the commenters, 'dlomax', puts it: 'Yet another luminous review, Mr. Clute. Now, what about another novel yourself? I'll read this new Adam Roberts, but I'd rather be reading a follow-up to Appleseed...' This old Adam Roberts agrees.

Taken in terms of plot, Yellow Blue Tibia is a thrill ride, if only because of Roberts's wit and snappy pacing. Skvorecky's mix of bitterness and heart makes him an engaging character. The mystery of what is actually going on is a pleasure to noodle around with while you read. Roberts, who has twice previously been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, is a confident writer who appears to be having buckets of fun telling this story. But what moves Yellow Blue Tibia from a well-told yarn into a layered novel worthy of more than one read is Roberts's commentary on the state of the genre and of its writers. Nuggets about the field abound.

Also, if that family on the cover looks glum now, wait until the waterline has risen over those trees in the background ...

In summary, Adam Roberts’ “Yellow Blue Tibia” is just superb and I can’t recommend it enough. I also strongly hope that the book will find a US publisher soon, but until then The Book Depository offers the novel at a good price with free shipping worldwide so I say get it!!!

That's three exclamation marks. Three! Better than one.

It does make me wonder whether I shouldn't have put more dancing into YBT ...

Blue Tibia is in some ways a less adventurous novel [than Swiftly]: structurally and stylistically, it plays far fewer games with one’s expectations, and stretches the form much less. Nevertheless, it is a very smart -- and often very funny -- yarn. ... Ultimately, then, this is a novel at home with the proliferation of quantum theory, interested in the idea that every event “happens in more than one way [...] spreading into a complex delta-basin of alternate realities.” ... [But] with its humour and intelligence, Yellow Blue Tibia is no precious, wordy text book. It is, and this with some élan, a wryly eloquent -- and at times deeply allusive -- work about the human imagination. Roberts just gets better and better.

Two lines, not none, on the Strange Horizon: Michael Froggatt's line (that he quite likes bits of the book, but thinks it overall 'rather less than the sum of its parts, although some of those parts are, individually, strikingly written, entertaining and thought-provoking'); and Abigail Nussbaum's line (she identifies both Bulgakovishness and irony in the novel, though she thinks the second of these veers into cynicism, and ends unable to judge: 'It's traditional for reviews to make at least some vague gesture at an evaluation of their subject—is this book good, and what readers are likely to find it enjoyable? Yellow Blue Tibia has proven somewhat problematic on that front.' To have baffled a reviewer as sharp and clever as Nussbaum is an achievement in which I can take, I think, a perverse kind of pride).

Finally there's the Times. You know, the Times. Lisa Tuttle's SF review column is now, it seems, monthly; and here's her opinion on YBT:

Yellow Blue Tibia opens with a group of science-fiction writers summoned for a meeting with Stalin in 1946. The Soviet leader, certain that America will fall within five years, is seeking a new enemy against which the people can unite to preserve the revolutionary vigour of communism. If this enemy is other than human, it will be possible to achieve the desired “dialectical synthesis: a fully peaceful world that is simultaneously united in a great patriotic war”.

Forty years later one surviving writer encounters another, who tells him that the scenario they invented, of “radiation aliens” attacking Ukraine, is starting to come true. The latest novel by the astonishingly inventive Adam Roberts is presented as Konstantin Skvorecky's memoir of the alien invasion of 1986. If you wonder why you don't remember the invasion, it explains everything.

Skvorecky is a great creation, comic and moving. His voice - deadpan, wry and convincingly Russian - is the best thing about this engaging, unusual novel, one of the best of the year.

The Daily Mail, no less. And they liked it. The review is mostly plot expo, and thumbnailing what goes on, but it ends: "Adam Roberts takes an intriguing premise and makes the most of it in this entertaining and intelligent novel."

HISTORY might be written by the victors, but historical novels tend to be the province of the losers. Although David Ebershoff's The 19th Wife and Adam Roberts' Yellow Blue Tibia are very different, but equally engaging, novels, they both are concerned with the human jetsam left behind by the tide of history. Moreover, they fulfil that vision by marrying the complexity and depth of "literary" work with the energy and velocity of "popular" fiction.

Good, eh? He goes on:

Roberts is a very witty writer, and there are moments of superb slapstick here (in particular, a scene where a KGB interrogator gets confused). Skvorecky has a mantra about "third ways" – "Time runs forwards. Or it runs backwards. One of the two. But it must do one of those two things, and there cannot be a third thing it does" – which becomes increasingly untenable as the narrative progresses.

The novel's conceit is driven by the fact that Soviet propaganda and sci-fi clichés are often indistinguishable – Stalin's name means literally Man of Steel – and the gap between rhetoric and reality gives a vivid insight into the absurdities of totalitarian collapse. History – possible histories, probable histories, secret histories – become the nemesis of Soviet "Destiny". "Comedy quantum agitprop" might be completely new genre of novel.

Both novels deal with major issues without hectoring the reader; both inform and entertain simultaneously. Who said the literary novel was dead?

I like Comedy Quantum Agitprop so much I shall include it as a new tag on this very site. Most excellent.

You never know exactly what you're going to get with an Adam Roberts novel, and that's a strength: each of his books is very different in feel from the last ... Yellow Blue Tibia is many things, but chiefly its a thriller that thinks it's a comedy. You'll smile, and maybe even laugh out loud, many times. But though it's clever [aha!] and always entertaining, you do tend to wonder exactly where this is all going, and there is a slight feeling, in the middle, of the book treading water before it's time to hit us with its chain of startling last-quarter revelations and sudden shifts of status quo. The result is not at all what I was expecting when I first picked up Yellow Blue Tibia. When your narrator suffers a partial lobotomy halfway through, rendring his whole way of thinking different, you know you're not in the hands of one of the most reliable of sorts. His status is just one of the things Roberts handles so impressively here, with a wee smile.

It is the best of books, it is the worst of books. It is gripping, captivating, astonishing, wonderfully funny, magnificently written, completely different, mess-with-your-head weird. It's also unsatisfying, bewildering and not much constructed as spilled out into a heap, and the ending makes you want to shake the author warmly by the throat until he promises to go back and write it again.

Mostly Holt says very good things: 'this is a book with more layers than a multi-storey car-park, and on one of them its a fantastically evocative account of what life was like in Soviet Russia, packed with telling details that makes it painfully immediate. Roberts's style is beautifully crafted, his dialogue is superb, his characterisation perfect. His use of syntax alone subtly conveys the mindset; after 50 or so pages, you may believe you're starting to think in Russian. The humour, which ranges from dark irony to laugh-out-loud comedy, works so well because it comes straight from character; not just decorative gags, seriously funny.' And there's more:

It's also a crazy sort of anti-thriller -- the hero's a crippled old man, which makes the scenes where he outwits and outfights a series of KGB heavies startling effective; his occasional sidekick is a querulous, middle-aged nuclear physicist with Asperger's synbdrome who's been demoted to driving a taxi; the love interest is a monstrously overweight American scientologist. We'd love to see a blockbuster movie (a version somewhat rewritten version of) this book.

Then there's the but: the novel 'skids a hits a tree' on the science fiction (ironic, 'since to a large extent, insofar as its about anything its about science fiction. And why people see UFOs. And alternate realities.') Holt can't see the 'slender silver thread of logical coherence running through the last 70 pages' (he can't? I thought it was a little over-obvious, myself ...), and he concludes:

Over-amibiton is definitely better than a lack of it, and this is a ferociously ambitious book that makes good on at least two-thirds of its extravagant promises. It's a shame that its high-yield language and blue-chip characterisation are underwitten by a sub-prime plot ... Arguably, boom-and-bust fiction is more annoying than plain consistent mediocrity ... Even so, this is a book you've got to read. It's better to have loved and ended up wanting to kick a hole in the wall than never to have loved at all.

Now that's a review.

It's 1945. Stalin calls together a group of science fiction writers and orders them to produce a scenario of alien invasion; he perceives the American threat to be on the wane, and the Soviet state needs an enemy against which to rally. No sooner have the writers developed a scenario than Stalin demands they forget the idea on pain of death. Skip to 1986, when Konstantin Skvorecky, ex-SF novelist and world-weary alcoholic now working as a translator, is approached by an old colleague who tries to convince him that their long-forgotten scenario is in fact coming to pass: aliens appear to be invading the world. What follows is in part a droll comedy of manners parodying the fall of Soviet communism, part an intellectual inquiry into the idea of multiple quantum realities and part an attempt to discover why, despite the ubiquity of reported sightings, UFOs have never been proved to exist. As ever with Roberts, the writing is impeccable and the ideas riveting.

Even I in my most glass-half-empty 'look for the negative buried in amongst the positives' frame of mind would have to concede: that is a good review.

I note on the ever-interesting blog of Paul McAuley (who wrote the introduction) that this fine collection is now out: edited by Pete Crowther, and containing a wealth of brilliant original fiction. My contribution is called 'Adam Robots' (do you see what I did, there, with the title?) and is one of my better stories, though I do say so myself. And I do. Say so, I mean. Myself. Adam Roboerts.

A big lovely box of mass market paperback copies of 'may be [my] masterpiece' Swiftly arrived in the post this morning [Amazon has it at £5.99: go on, you know you want to].

Over at Strange Horizon's 'best of 2008' feature, Dan Hartland picks Swiftly. Which is encouraging, not least because I'd say that though some others have misunderstood the book, he has a good sense of what it's about: 'what I admired about it was something other than its perfection. It's nice when ambitions are realised, but very often it's as gratifying to see a writer set himself an impossible goal which he strives for with real relish. Swiftly was such a book: increasingly unwieldy and unconventional, it addressed the very limits of the modern novelistic form by harking back to the age of its birth. A sequel to Gulliver's Travels which fanned out that novel's implications in a variety of directions—both literary and speculative—Swiftly had big (perhaps deliberate) holes, and, like a badly printed jigsaw puzzle, sometimes didn't quite match up. But in its verve and its cannibalistic inventiveness, it was as exciting and inquiring a science fiction novel as I'd care to expect, and one I've mulled over all year.'

My real ambition, as perhaps I've noted here before, is to write the novelistic equivalent of a Rothko or a Ben Nicholson abstract. But failing that (and I'm still not quite sure how to do it) in Swiftly I think I at least managed something suitably Braque-y, or cubist-Picassoish, or maybe Chapman Brothersesque, of which I'm quietly proud. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with representational styles of painting; but after a while it starts to feel restrictive, when everything is Pre-Raphaelite (or derivatives thereof) or John Martin. I mean, a lot of people like academic art; and there's nothing wrong with that. But there ought to be other styles out there as well. So that's what I do. And you can see for yourself! For only £5:99! What's not to like?

My own best-of picks are also over there at the SH link, should you be interested.

And here is relevant the amazon page.

What is it? It's nearly 600 large close-printed pages, and a mountain of sfnal scholarship on a wealth of sfnal topics, that's what it is. Plus it's the result of a great deal of work; for myself, but more so for my three estimable co-editors. Worthwhile, though. Due to appear at next January. And if £85 is more than your post-crunch finances can afford, there's a paperback edition due as well, although not (golly) until 30 August 2010.

One thing that came up (amongst many) concerned Antonius Diogenes Wonders Beyond Thule, the now-lost ancient novel known to us because Photius wrote out a fairly detailed summary of it. One thing I'd like to do before I die is restore this (as it were): write out a full-length version of it incorporating the fragments we have, stuff likely to have been in it back-formulated from likely satirical pisstaking in Lucian and elsewhere, and stuff likely to have been in it on account of Diogenes Pythagorean views. It would be most excellent. Now, I'd always thought that one of the nice things about this novel is that it takes some of its characters to the moon (described as a gên katharôtatên, which I would say meant a clean, pure, spotless land; but which Nick argued meant purged, desert, blank land). Both Nick and Karen were adamant that the characters come close to the moon (in the arctic circle) but don't actually go there: they approach, see there's nothing to see (as it were) and come home again. I disagreed, but the problem for me is that, taken together or considered individually, Nick and Karen have more classical expertise in their little toes than I in my whole body. So they're probably right. (Photius's summary doesn't say that they don't travel to the moon; but it doesn't say that they do, either). Ah well. I'd still like to write my 24-chapter Diogenean proto-novel. I could add it to my pile of eminently commercial writing projects.

And there have been early reviews, thanks to the bound proofs sent into the System by Gollancz. Thus, Liz at Torque Control:

Yellow Blue Tibia is probably the strangest of the books I read last week, but in a good way. A story of SF writers in the post-war Soviet Union, who wrote a story about aliens which starts to come true, it is narrated by an ironic, alcoholic and elderly Russian writer and reads like one of the more farcical Coen brothers films.... There’s even a strange love story going on, in between the jokes about Scientology and testicles and the SF plot, and it’s refreshingly different from almost anything else I have read this year.

High praise, in my book, that ('different', I mean: too much literature is not different, nowadays, and thrillers are worse offenders than many). And here's Adam Whitehead, at the Wertzone:

Yellow Blue Tibia is certainly a different SF book. It isn't strictly an alternate history, but plays around with its ideas and tropes. It isn't a comedy either, but I guarantee it will make you laugh out loud on at least several occasions. The combination of several farcical scenes with very polite and proper Russian grammar gives rise to some entertaining linguistic combinations even Jack Vance would be proud of, whilst the testicular-obsessed KGB interrogation scene is quite possibly a work of genius.

I love reviewers who can put 'testicles' and 'genius' in the same sentence. But there's more:

As with Swiftly, Roberts' previous novel, the book has a pretty straightforward and accessible opening half followed by the plot moving into an area much more open to interpretation. Yellow Blue Tibia isn't quite as open-ended as Swiftly, but it does demand maximum attention as several scenes of complex and convoluted exposition take place which are both informative and extremely amusing. Even though the reader is pretty much told what exactly is going on, there is the slight feeling of the book ending with the reader being tipped out and left trying to remember exactly what the hell just happened. But in a good way. There's a definite delayed reaction before you go, "Aha, that was clever!" Yellow Blue Tibia (****) ... is a clever, confounding and strikingly amusing book that will make you ponder important burning historical questions.

Well, I've been busy: rather too busy, in many ways. But I'll be popping back in rather more frequently now, I'm pleased to say. To start with, I've just received in the post the very splendid-looking bound proofs of my next novel, Yellow Blue Tibia. I'm as excited as a jellyfishing Spongebob Squarepants; I'm as happy as the sunlit sea; I raise my arms.

In other news, I've sold an end-of-the-world story called 'The Noose' to Allen Ashley for his forthcoming PS collection of original fiction Catastrophia, which is due out in 2010.

It's a preposterous suggestion: Gulliver's Travels turns out to be a factual account. The thimble-sized Lilliputians and the giant Brobdingnagians really do exist. The former are enslaved by the English, creating intricate mechanical goods in London's factories. The French have invaded England aided by the giants, who splish through the Thames as though it's a paddling pool. Caught up in this farrago are Abraham Bates, a po-faced Englishman who sympathises with the Lilliputians, and Eleanor Burton, the clever woman married unwillingly to a factory man who keeps his Lilliputian workers locked in hutches. What results is a salty intrigue involving sanguine Brobdingnagians and eerie Lilliputians, European revolutionaries and English turncoats.

Roberts' fantasy is pegged to an underlying realism and eye for detail, stewed in masterful language: a bell tinkles and "some more silver sound sprinkled free"; a headache grips Eleanor's head "like a hoop of suffering". Eleanor's an excellent heroine, shrewd and acerbic, walking through a Victorian world in perpetual stink and motion.

When not conjuring up fictional fancies, Adam Roberts is a Victorian literature professor and his erudition and enjoyment give every page a witty authenticity. You can quite believe in the mini flying machines that convey messages between rich businessmen at opposite ends of Oxford Street.

In a way, Roberts is too gifted a brain for this type of supercharged narrative. He could effortlessly produce a poignant, heavyweight work echoing Middlemarch. But it wouldn't be half as much fun as this.

The IoS illustrated the review with the cover of a completely different book; but that glitch aside, this is heartening stuff.