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 ...

But, look, here's Nick Hubble in Strange Horizons, who likes it a good deal: 'The editors ... are to be highly commended for assembling a superb team of contributors and producing a volume that is both an outstanding work of reference in its own right and a comprehensive guide to science fiction and the scholarship surrounding it. This is a book which will last, informing and challenging scholars at all levels for many years to come. Its success will not be measured simply in sales or the number of subsequent editions, but in the work it will inspire as SF continues to grow as an academic field.' Excellent!

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.

I rather like the cover to this one (for after all what is SF if not a giant spaceship bound for exotic planets that happens to have gone murderously insane upon the way?)

Not so mammoth a project as the Companion, but pretty laborious for all that. Please to be advised: 'Andrew Butler' should be 'Andrew M. Butler'. Also, there should be a comma before the 'and'; and 'fifty' should be '50'. Apart from that it's error free, I think.

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.

I'm pondering the propriety, or wisdom, of responding to the points made at greater length, but find myself on balance disinclined, partly because as dead-author I have to concede that I am not so well positioned to judge as these four are, and partly from the natural reticence of an Englishman. But that shouldn't hold you back; go there, and comment. [Update: 7 July ... in the end I overcame my disinclination sufficiently to post some responsive words on characterisation at The Valve; but not, I hope, by way of naked self-justification in the teeth of readerly dislike. I continually bear in mind that there's a good okham's-razorish possibility that the reason Paul Kincaid thinks the novel is shit ... is because it is shit. I'm happy to concede, actually, that the novel is shit. The question is whether it is good shit, or bad.]

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.

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.

Is that enough to be getting on with? I’d say so.