I have just finished By Light Alone by Adam Roberts. If you like political literary novels, if you like emotionally compelling stories, if you like science fiction, you will like this. Hell, if you like your words strung together in beautiful and profound sentences so that you reread them for the sheer joy of language, you will like this.

Then, for balance, an anonymous reader, reported by Michelle Howe:

I recommended BLA to a collegue who likes hard sf and political intrigue, so of course I thought he'd love it. He didn't, and now is telling everyone not to trust my recs or reviews.

Marmite-acious. Over on the Strange Horizons blog Niall Harrison, that tall man, has written a characteristically insightful and intelligent account of the novel, putting it in the wider context of plays novels what I write:

Adam Roberts novels, it seems to me today, often worry at questions of sincerity and insincerity -- or authenticity and inauthenticity... For someone often pegged as a quite cynical, sardonic commentator, Roberts' fiction concerns itself quite often with what you might call verities of "the human condition", as conventionally understood -- there are essays to be written about love in Adam Roberts novels, and war in Adam Roberts novels -- albeit rarely in conventional forms, indeed usually deliberately contrary or challenging: the emotional arcs in Swiftly most infamously, perhaps. And more significantly, science fiction as published today is a fundamentally sincere genre: earnest, even, both politically and stylistically. Because Adam Roberts novels are only ever sincere in backhanded ways, and frequently insincere in obvious ways, it's easy to see them as critiquing science fiction; and they usually are; but per Puchalsky they're usually doing more than that as well, I think.

Niall links to pieces by Rich Puchalsky and Paul Kincaid that I've mentioned before on this site, but he also links to an interesting essay by Lavie Tidhar about me qua problem, 'Shall I Tell You The Problem With Adam Roberts?'. The whole thing is thought-provoking, but Lavie's thesis is summed-up in his conclusion: 'He is both the Fool and Knave of science fiction.'

So there you go.

The whole point of SF being a literature of ideas is not that it's supposed to be ideas about geosynchronous satellites that people later actually invent. Well, some fans think that it is, but I don't. It's supposed to be about ideas that de-center you, make you rethink where you are in ways that more realistic literature can't, because reality as we know it doesn't furnish what we need to see our position of privilege. Hard SF is supposed to do that with scientific ideas, ideas that have force because, as far as we know, they're really true. That is what is essential to hard SF, not scientific plausibility in all of the story's supports. So, does Anti-Copernicus work as hard SF? I think it does.

Rich knows both astrophysics and environmental science, so I value his judgment on this even more than I usually would. And Liviu Siciu (aka 'Fantasy Book Critic') has the following to say:

Anticopernicus (A+) is very good stuff and worth all the money and more, since it offers in those 40 pages what others offer in 300, while it has a great resolution in true sfnal spirit. Despite being self published, the editing was top notch too, with only one typo that jumped at me. Highly recommended as a blend of literary fiction, space sf and musings on humanity and our place in the Universe. Since the style is so Adam Roberts, I think Anticopernicus serves as a very good introduction to the work of the author, so I also suggest to give it a try if you want to see why I rate Adam Roberts in my top 10 list of contemporary sf writers.

There are some more reactions to the piece on Goodreads.

One more thing: soon after the book's e-publication I got an email from Ange Mlinko (after whom the protagonist is named); she subsequently blogged her reaction on the LRB blog. Interesting stuff.

TWO years ago, Kim Stanley Robinson declared that Adam Roberts ought to have won that year's Man Booker Prize. Roberts, like writers as diverse as China Mieville, Will Self, Ken MacLeod and David Wingrove, exists in that weird hinterland between literary and genre fiction. By Light Alone is both more interesting in terms of its ideas and more memorable in terms of the actual, sentence-by-sentence writing on the page than much of what passes as serious fiction. I once, in a rather exasperated moment, said that I yearned for a literature without dinner parties. By Light Alone, with nauseous and visceral brilliance, manages to be a great contemporary novel that includes even them. ... Roberts is asking important questions about the nature of need, the metaphysics of hunger and how revolutions come about, both technologically and politically. Maybe it's time for a new prize: not for "literary fiction" or "good reads" but for novels that actually challenge.

To have pleased a critic as intelligent and perceptive as Kelly is very gratifying indeed. Here's the equally intelligent Guy Haley at SFX:

Is it possible for a writer to follow the precepts of Moore’s Law, doubling their capacity for excellence with every book? Probably not, but Adam Roberts is giving it a spirited try ... Roberts cunningly pricks out the ridiculous shape of our society with wickedly sharp satire. Inequality and self-obsession are his targets, and yet he manages to hit them while keeping his characters entirely human and sympathetic. No-one does SF parables quite like Roberts, and as usual it’s all spun from the most amazing prose. Taken in isolation, his sentences here tend to the overly candied, but the effect of them en masse is hypnotically poetic. It’s brilliantly effective, and affecting. Roberts’s SF novels are all worthy of praise, but there’s a certain majesty to By Light Alone – better rush out now and buy it, before the mainstream literary establishment sweeps Roberts under its wing and tells us he’s not aloud to play out with the nerds anymore. It’s hard for us sometimes to credit some of the claims made by PR, but when Gollancz calls Roberts one of the most important writers of his generation, it’s something of an understatement: this man puts art at the heart of our genre.

Here's the estimable David Barnett, in the Independent on Sunday:

If By Light Alone were written by David Mitchell or Margaret Atwood, for example, it would doubtless be said to "transcend its science fiction" roots, as all literary fiction which borrows SF trappings must. But By Light Alone is unashamedly SF, and would that half the supposed "literary" novels on the shelves today were as well written, thoughtful and intelligent as this.

And here is James Lovegrove, in the Financial Times:

Adam Roberts is our most intellectually engaged and literary science fiction author, crafting sentences the equal of any by Ian McEwan or Kazuo Ishiguro. His 11th novel, By Light Alone, hinges on the idea that genetic engineering has created hair that can photosynthesise sunlight. The world’s poor survive simply by being outdoors, while the rich shun the treatment and consume expensive food. ... Not only is the novel a satire about the gulfs of understanding between rich and poor but also an affecting study of the gulfs of understanding between parents and children.

Finally here's Gwyneth Jones, in the Guardian. A rather negative review -- though it's an honour to be reviewed by a writer of her stature:

Every element in the story of Leah's disappearence and return will be equally, annoyingly shorn of context, all details blurred and dim – swamped in the mush of Marie's utter indifference, and George's helpless failure to connect. Clearly, one of the targets of Roberts's satire is a fat-headed culture of ignorance. Likewise, there's a righteous purpose, as well as some malicious glee, in the obesity motif. The titanic blimps who stomp through these serious pages, in a pastiche of gross-out reality TV – Very Fat People Having Sex; Very Fat People Sicking Up Their Dinners – are there to teach us a lesson. By making visible the invisible blubber that swaddles our own beautiful people – the sickening cushion of wealth that smothers empathy – Roberts strips the super-rich of glamour and lampoons everyperson's complicity in the toxic religion of greed. If some readers are offended or sceptical of his motives, that's a risk he seems happy to take. At the Ararat resort there is an attraction called the Ice-Cream Mountain, a Brobdingnagian treat obliquely recalling the mountainous diamond in F Scott Fitzgerald's story, "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz". Fitzgerald's influence is cited in the publicity for By Light Alone, and invoked by the novel's handsome cover; and justly so. But Roberts's updating of romantic jazz age pessimism is ironic. The wondrous gem has become an infantile heap of goo. The rich just aren't different enough, these days. Extreme wealth isn't a tragic, interesting disease, it's a planet-wrecking blight. It's not pretty, and it's not romantic.

And, just for the heck of it, you should also check out Adam Roberts’ The Dragon with the Girl Tattoo (Gollancz), a wickedly funny parody of the first Millennium novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It follows the events of Larsson’s book pretty closely: Hellfire Vagner disappeared three centuries ago, journalist Kaal Brimston is hired to find out what happened to her, and Lizbreath Salamander ultimately solves the mystery. Larsson’s dark, complex novel is an almost obligatory target for parody, but Roberts, who also wrote the hysterical The Va Dinci Cod (a spoof of The Da Vinci Code), shows a lot of respect for the source material. Sure, he makes fun of it, but he also clearly understands what Larsson was doing, and, on its own terms, this parody is as layered and surprising as the original.

Nice!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.

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]