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 the French military to escort a computational device from London to York, he falls into the company of opium addict Henry Oldenberg, the dean of York, and in love with Eleanor Burton, who combines sexual naivety with scientific precocity. What follows is both a compulsive comedy of manners and a free-wheeling metaphysical riff on the nature of religion, the universe and scale, with the arrival of extraterrestrials far larger than the Brobdingnagians.

That's cocaine, not opium, but otherwise a decent review. Compulsively free-wheeling, you know.Swiftly

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.
short fiction

Vole Pogrom

Another intriguing novel from one of the UK's most important working writers of sf, and one of his best.

I'm going to call this literary, and that's going to get me into trouble. We rail against the tedious taxonomic classification of
books, especially using such an emotive term, connoted as it is with snobbery and superiority. No doubt this hypocrisy on my part will plunge like a Lilliputian dagger into the eyes of various readers, but it stands, because you know exactly what I mean. By small conveniences do we aggravate one another.

Swiftly is an expansion of Roberts' short story, an ingenious extrapolation of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. It is 144 years after Gulliver returned home. Britain and France are at war, and the marvellous creatures Gulliver encountered have been inevitably subdued and enslaved by the European power.

There are many areas where the book excels. Its description of a world made wondrous by the advent of Brobdingnagian sheep, talking cavalry and Lilliputian craftsmen (whose tiny hands allow them to construct fantastical machines) is entrancing, the middle act is an amusingly apt rebuke to the 19th century romantic novel, and in the final stages we are treated to an imaginative dissection of Swiftly's multi-scalar universe.

Less successful is the book's theme of the worthiness of a man to be loved. Roberts goes too far in his abasement of his protagonist Abraham Bates; among many other penances, he makes Bates a coprophiliac who loathes his own arousal. Admittedly, Roberts does nothing without reason -- Bates' peccadilloes illustrate the gloriously physical reality of love, furthering the story's debunking of Victorian romantic myth, and they form a sly scatalogical adjunct of the book's discourse on scale and corruption. But Bates begins with indignity already heaped upon him, and to have him have to redeem himself through yet more indignifty seems suffering for suffering's sake. It's almost Catholic, and Bates is no Christ.

Yet this is a small criticism. The book fully takes up the beat of Swift's drum on the contrariness of human nobility, and Roberts cleverly carries on the mode of reversal that the original novel employs. We have the Houyhnhnms, the most rational of Swift's creations, recast as broken beasts of burden, the gentle Brobdingnagians forced to fight as soldiers, and arrogant Europeans compelled to embrace their own insignificance. Finally, Bates finds peace within his own grubby world, something Gulliver failed to achieve.

It's a good taste of Roberts' work, sporting many of his tropes: Bates is flawed, a naive, depressive idealist who betrays is country; there's an antagonistic supporting character in the shape of the cocaine-addled Dean of York; we meet a number of obstructive, ambivalent authority figures; and there's a difficult journey on foot, and a war which our hero has little stomach for. It's not a retreading of old ground, however. These are merely some of the authors' favourite stage settings ,and he knows how to employ them well.

Swiftly is probably the most accessible of Roberts' books to date, too. Besides the readership's obvious familiarity with the source material, his prose has found an agreeable balance in its literary flourish, and his three main characters, though still Robertsian in their flaws and peculiarities, are easy to befriend. The narrative loses some of its steam towards the end, but, like the Brobdingnagians, the book has a big heart.

He writes an intimate book, does Roberts, and you get the feeling his characters must suffer so much because he believes himself, not them, to be unworthy. I suspect that when Roberts' confidence grows a little, we will see a truly great work, rather than a merely excellent one, from this most fascinating of authors.

Swiftly

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, ironically, a slow-paced novel, not outright mimicking the flowery style of the era, but certainly taking its share of cues from it. There’s little of the satire that made the classic that inspired it such a lasting success, but that’s not a problem – Adam Roberts is simply using Swift’s creations, not writing a sequel to his original story, and the change of style helps to give Swiftly its own distinct universe. It’s an excellent piece of historical fantasy in its own right, and would likely stand even without the Gulliver connection.

What makes the main story so interesting is the merging of human politics with the new inhuman characters; the struggles between France and England due to the addition of new manpower and technology imported from the rediscovered islands. It’s familiar, but just different enough to be fresh ...

The concept behind Swiftly was strong the first time Roberts used it, as a short story in a collection (which was also, confusingly, called Swiftly) and as a full novel it really gets time to breathe. It’s almost enough to make you grab a boat and head out in search of new islands.

Splendid. I'm still waiting for a copy of the most recent Deathray to arrive in Staines, since it contains a review of the same novel by Sir Guy Haley, no less; but it hasn't made it to any of this town's newsagents yet.Swiftly

Other News: a couple of people have asked me whether I'll be doing a round-up review of the Clarke 08 shortlist, as has been my habit for a few years now. I'd gladly do this, but my usual place (infinity plus) has come to the end of its natural span. I talked a couple of other venues but they either didn't want me or didn't reply, so I may be spared the labour of writing the round-up this year. (I daresay I could jot some thoughts down on one of my blogs. Of course nobody reads my blogs, but that might actually be a liberating factor when it comes to the writing).

Overall it's not a shortlist about which I can say me gusto: not, although this has been the complaint of some others, on account of the proportion of 'mainstream lit' titles it features, for I don't see anything wrong in that, but because it's all rather samey. All of these books are historically-proximate alt-historical or near-future thrillers/adventure stories. Tom Hunter, the award administrator, has described the list as a 'map' of the contemporary SF scene, but if it is it's like one of those gag-maps you used to be able to buy: 'map of the world from the point of view of a Bostonite' which is two-thirds Cape Cod with other elements squashed to the horizon; or 'map of the world from the point of view of a Chelsea resident' which is 75% Sloane Square and the King's Road, with 'the north' running along the top border and nothing else there. (This sort of thing, in fact).

Or maybe Hunter is correct, and this list does indeed represent the state of SF today, rather than, say, just representing the taste of a judging panel who all happen to like reading alt-now/near-future thrillery adventure stories. But that would be a slightly depressing thing: a symptom of a genre shrinking and dessicating from the fullest scope of its imaginative possibility into a subset of airport thrillerdom. The best books on the list are probably the Baxter and the Morgan, but none of the titles here embody the mind-stretching, the sense-of-wonder, the conceptual metaphoricity and poetic, imagistic penetration of the SF that first made me fall in love with the genre. (An exception to this last judgment might be made for the Raw Shark Texts; but I found a deadening literalism to the way that novel handled its core metaphor, indebted to but lacking the sparkle of The Phantom Tollbooth; and I thought the Jaws-intertext was clunkily treated). Again, apart (to some extent) from the Baxter, they're all rather straightforward texts. Irony is not their idiom. They are books that if they are serious (about dystopia, the situation of the world today etc) are strenuously serious, and that if they are intertextual are ponderously rather than playfully intertextual. Naturally this, and that last point especially, is a statement of personal taste, not a broader aesthetic judgment: lots of people, inside and outside the genre, dislike ironic art. They prefer to know where they stand.

Finally: I learn today that my story 'Petrolpunk' has been bought by Nick Gevers for the Solaris steampunk collection Extraordinary Engines. Hurrah! The buzz surrounding this collection has been very good, and I'm chuffed to be on board. The fact that I said nice things about Nick in my previous post is an entirely unrelated matter; although my understanding is that he is indeed a tall, powerfully-built stallion of a man with an IQ in the thousands.Chatter

Swiftly ... is an enormously ambitious novel, a steampunk epic of considerable force and ingenuity. It is also a deeply bizarre book, whose protagonists, sometimes to the detriment of the plot, conduct a love affair based on disgust and the stimulating odor of excrement. Why Roberts chose this admixture of elements is a little mysterious, unless it serves as a commentary on the original Dean Swift's fascination with smutty jokes and toilet humor. As well, the eighteenth century, whose spirit the novel explores, was generally an age of smells and off-color bawdiness; maybe that indeed plays a part ... Despite its peculiarities, Swiftly may be Roberts's best novel so far. It is a book he had in mind for a long time, and its maturity of conception is impressive.

That's spot-on, I'd say, though it would be nice if that 'despite' in the last sentence there were 'because of'. But one can't have everything.Swiftly

SFX like it, expressing their liking with four stars. Mind you, in the selfsame issue they note the appearance of the mass-market paperback of Land of the Headless in much less positive terms. They don't like it. They call it 'oddball.' It was another one of those double-take moments for me, the realisation that for SF criticism 'oddball' is a term of dispraise. (Doesn't that seem wrongheaded to you? Isn't oddball something you go to SF for--to escape the deadening slick professional sheen of airport thrillers and sagas?) Ah well; there's no accounting for tastes. Perhaps what's wanted are the trappings of oddness, not an oddness that goes all the way down to the balls. But of course, I would say that, wouldn't I. I can choose to believe that reviewers just don't know what to make of my fiction, when it's just as likely they do know what to make of it, they just don't like it.
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 feel at home here, even whilst being constantly reminded that we are far from that. Roberts deepens yet further our empathy for his at-sea protagonists. The world has changed—I feel it in the prose.
...
Swift's hatred of structures and systems, but his love of individuals with their foibles and quirks, is brought to the fore in Swiftly, a worthy science fictional successor to Swift's indispensable masterwork. If Roberts has explicated Swift's surreal world with wit and not a little learning, he has also in no small part written a book equal parts adventure story and social commentary. Its philosophy is Swift's, but its success is all Roberts's own.

He has some small problems with the way the original short-story has been reworked into a full-length novel, and with aspects of the characterisation, but he also says that this is 'criticism which doesn't have much to say about how enjoyable the book is to read', which is nice.

In another medium, Anthony Browne at the fruity and opal Starburst magazine gives it a full-page review; he also has some very nice things to say, although some less positive things too, and on balance the latter rather outweigh the former: 3 stars out of 5. I console myself by thinking, perhaps erroneously, that they are the best three stars: stars three, four and five, perhaps, and not the baser, less valuable stars one and two. Who knows?Swiftly

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, and I have the highest respect for her. Can't wait to get my hands on an actual copy.Gradisil

Other news: I'll be appearing at the Paris Book Fair, hanging around the booth of the formidable Bragelonne, 15th-16th March, an eventuality occasioned by the imminent appearance of the French translation of Gradisil. I'll also poke my nose in at Orbital Eastercon, just on the Saturday. I may even be on some panels.No Tags

• Grey, Jon Armstrong (Night Shade)
• Undertow, Elizabeth Bear (Bantam Spectra)
• From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain, Minister Faust (Del Rey)
• Nova Swing, M. John Harrison (Bantam Spectra)
• Gradisil, Adam Roberts (Pyr)
• Ally, Karen Traviss (Eos)
• Saturn Returns, Sean Williams (Ace)

Impressive, what? It's interesting, I'd say, that when arranged alphabetically by author like that, the list of novel titles acrostically spells out GUF 'N' GAS. Not that this is in any way a commentary upon the excellence of the novels shortlisted this year.
No Tags

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.

sf criticism

It's a powerful work of philosophical literature, thought-provoking from the outset. Of course, not everyone wants this degree of philosophical depth from a science fiction novel. The "needs bigger ray-guns" lobby will probably find it over-complicated, morally ambiguous, and lacking sufficient action and sensawunda, but I doubt very strongly that Roberts was pitching for that particular set of seats. The linguistic tone may be hard going for some readers, also; in keeping with the overall sense of parody and satire, the prose has more than a hint of the King James biblical to it, which is emphasised by the inherent wordiness of Cavala, the man of letters, delivering the narrative second-hand.

But as I mentioned, Roberts is about as literary a science fiction writer as you're likely to find, and unashamedly so. And he walks the walk as well as talking the talk. Land of the Headless is a powerful piece of work that uses science fictional themes and tropes to shine a light into the dark corners of the world we live in right now, which some would argue is science fiction's highest purpose –- I among them. And nothing truly worthwhile is ever easy –- if that's an attitude you share with respect to your choices of reading, I commend Land of the Headless to you as one of the most clever books published in the genre this year.

Neat, eh? 'Most clever' rather than 'cleverest'. There may be some supersubtle distinction being drawn there. More to the point, I discover that "clever albatross" is a googlewhack. Although presumably it won't be after I post this.Headless

In other news, I'm thirty-thousand words into Yellow Blue Tibia and am enjoying myself. Better, today is the last day of RHUL term, so I'll have (give or take things like the birth of a son) a relatively free run at writing for the next few weeks.

Yes, the birth-of-a-son thing. Today, as well as being the last day of Michaelmas term, is Rachel's due-date. No sign of the baby yet, but presumably any day now.No Tags

Roberts, whom I always think must be the hardest working writer in the world, is a real shining gem of British genre fiction and one with many, many facets. No two books of his are alike, and his particular skill is extrapolating an entire novel from the kernel of singular idea.

Many many, no less.  I'm flattered.No Tags

Not 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 never really make it to the stars. Along the way, he finds himself distracted by Derrida, Descartes, Patrick Moore, modernism, and much else besides.

Alien, by Simon King
Dr. King is on a hunt; he’s hunting aliens. On the hunt he meets with Japanese cyborgs and medieval monsters, strange gods and the creatures of the deep – but will he find any aliens? Indeed, are there any to find?

My afterword adds little, to be honest, to these literary-critical riches; although it does include two never-before-seen, unavailable-elsewhere short stories (short shorts, you see), one of which--I shan't tell you which one--is the best short story I've ever written. The amazon page for the book is here; and the publisher's site, Inkerman Press, here. Why not buy a copy? Can you give me one good reason? No, you can't.conceptual breakings

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.No Tags

Nice 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 a mere 12,500 won: a bargain if ever I saw one.No Tags

What do you reckon?

I've obtained a Teach Yourself Russian book-plus-CD, and am starting, in a rough-and-ready way, to acquire a little of this glorious language.  At the moment I'm a little bogged down, on p.7, in a simulated Customs check at Moscow Sheremetyevo International Airport, where a variety of very basic pieces of information are being conveyed between a traveller and a custom's official.  But give me time.

In other news, some more reviews of Splinter.  One from Dreamwatch Total Sci Fi's Paul Simpson:

The survivor of a global catastrophe has to come to terms with a very different outlook on life… A major part of the story is about his growing up, and realising that the world does not revolve around him – even the smaller splinter of the planet on which he finds himself when some terrible event splits Earth into numerous planetoids which miraculously manage to maintain an atmosphere. Roberts very effectively takes you inside Sevradac’s head, complete with its Freudian slips, loosely remembered pieces of jingles and nursery rhymes and total self-absorption...It’s also an examination of the benefits of being part of a community rather than standing out as an individual, and the trauma when you realise that you have become the ‘adult’ part of a family relationship. We only see the others around Sevradac through his eyes, but can sense their desire to include him until he pushes them away once too often - only eventually to find something that will accept him no matter what... Stylistically Splinter is an unusual novel, with its three sections written in past, present and future tenses respectively, and it's one that stays with you long after you’ve finished it.

And Peter Loftus in Interzone issue #212: "Splinter is a re-imagining of a little-known Jules Verne novel, Off on a Comet. Stylistically, the first part of Splinter calls de Lillo and Auster to mind. The writing is crisp, incisive and assured... full marks to Roberts for not playing it safe... devotees of literary sf will find much to love here..."No Tags

 I'm a little inhibited from responding to the review, actually, since it is so very positive about both books (although of the two Hoyle prefers Splinter).  Also I'm the author, which is to say dead, so my judgment probably isn't the best one.  But I thought there were some very penetrating observations in this review, and a genuine understanding of what I'm about as a writer (for good and ill), and Hoyle captures things that go to the heart of these two books.  "Like Gradisil before it, The Land of the Headless is a novel about self-delusion and curtailment, both physical and ideological," she says, and she's not wrong.

What makes Splinter different is that Roberts writes much warmer, more rhythmic prose; not less mindful, since his writing is always heavily controlled, but more fertile. Lush, even. Whereas the style of Headless communicates crippling repression and the terrible absence of sensation in its spareness, so Splinter conveys the fecund landscape and frustrated eroticism of the end of the world through its sensual immediacy.

At the end she compares me to Ursula le Guin, which, enormously flattering though it is, is a little discombobulating, since she's a writer so evidently in a different class to me (and, to be fair to me, in a different class to almost everybody writing today).Headless, Splinter

This 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 are.

No Tags

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 takes new and cruel forms: criminals can be beheaded but remain living. Jon Cavala, a poet, is beheaded for adultery. He is fitted with devices that replace his sensory apparatus and keep him in a half-life. Cavala wanders the countryside, suffers discrimination, and ends up coerced into becoming a soldier. Here Roberts' speculations about future warfare are very grim. At what point, he posits, do we abandon humanity? This book has a cool tone and intellectual rigour reminiscent of Yevgeny Zamyatin's classic We.

Not for an Age but for all time; or more accurately yes, actually, for an Age, and more specifically for the 16th September 2007 edition of said.Headless

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 it, having a wedge of present day California fly off into space with a complement of cult members. While Verne was primarily concerned with telling an adventure story, Splinter is an acute psychological analysis of Hector Servadac Junior, a distant relation of the original novel's protagonist. He's a complex character, obsessed with sex and fixed in a permanent adolescent state due to being unable to break away from domination by his father, an overbearing guru-figure. This is a clever thought-experiment from a writer gaining a reputation for producing a string of wholly original novels.

And whilst we're on the subject, I did something for the online version of The Guardian, the ever-so-slightly hubristically named Guardian Unlimited, on 'Verne's Forgotten Masterpieces', which was also obliquely about Splinter.  There's also a competition, and the possibility of winning a copy, at the end of that link.  And, finally, I wrote a blog entry on the poverty of Verne-in-English translations, here.  (I later wrote a follow up piece on the same topic for the Valve, here).  So there's today's Vernish variety, right there.Splinter

The nomination is the first part of a lengthy process; a ten-person committee whittles the nominees down to finalists, and thence to a winner; but neverthless ... excellent news!Gradisil

Splinter is a conscious, dedicated riff on one of Jules Vernes most bizarre novels--Hector Servadac ... while Hector may be an adult he's not exactly a grown-up, and his struggle to define himself against his father while denying the events that have transpired make him, if not particularly likeable, a complex and believable character.  Splinter is a fascinating book on many levels.  There's the changing terrain of the 'splinter' itself, which appears to be slowly terraformed by the create that hit the Earth, and the disparate group of personalities surviving upon it, and the endlessly rich central relationship ... ultimately there's a lot to admire here.  But in the end, the book is almost as strange and mystifying as its inspiration; the three chapters of the novel are each told in a different tense, past, present and future.  It's a novel effect and makes the final chapter something of a fever dream; a possible divination of the future that is ambiguous and opaque, rich with interpretative scope,  This is thoughtful, literate sf; low on thrills but offering much food for thought.

The verdict: three and a half stars, making it, in the opinion of Deathray, half-a-star better than Hyperdrive ('mostly laughter-free fun from this oh-too-gentle science fiction comedy'), and half-a-star shy of the dizzy heights of Coyote Ragtime Show Vol 3 ('a dozen sexy android sisters with high calibre weaponry').  Not for the first time in my career, it was a review I had to read twice to divine the actual thrust; not because it is poorly expressed but because my own preconceptions about what sf is got in the way.  On a first reading I genuinely thought that the phrase 'almost as strange and mystifying as its inspiration' was an example of pretty much the highest praise a reviewer can offer a book ... why, after all, else go to SF except for strangeness and mystery?  This was foolish of me; strangeness and mystery are not what the sf-fan doctor is ordering nowadays.  I'm assuming it is those qualities (plus the unlikeability of the central character--when will I learn?  Likeable characters only!) that have devalued the precious star rating.  Ah well; live and learn.Splinter

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 from the genre's foremost writers', in says on its back-blurb.  It's not wrong.  Go, buy it.

short fiction

short fiction

The holiday enabled a certain amount of thinking; reflection, and specifically self-reflection, being a needful thing from time to time for a writer.  Or for anyone.  In part I have been pleasantly digesting some of the reactions to Headless (you can read them, below) and in particular the Deathray review and some of the reader comments posted (you can read them directly below) pendant to the sentiments expressed therein.  This is what I've been thinking.  My last three novels, Snow, Gradisil and Headless, are all--I can see, now--desert novels.  A desert of water ice; a desert of orbital vacuum; a desert of the soul; and in all three cases the concomitant mental and emotional sensibilities, and aesthetics.  In a way these three novels represent a sort-of trilogy, a thematic trilogy; and they are accordingly and necessarily rather barren.  I can hardly complain if people find this offputting.

What are the words that Robert Bolt put in the mouth of King Faisal in conversation with Lawrence, T.E., CB, DSO?  These: "I think you are another of these desert-loving English: Doughty, Stanhope, Gordon of Khartoum. No Arab loves the desert. We love water and green trees.  There is nothing in the desert. No man needs nothing."  One of the things that I love about that movie is the way we believe in Lawrence's love for the desert, the way it is never seen as mere romanticised orientalism, or topographic idealisation.  He knows what the desert is, and nevertheless craves it.  What sort of man craves nothing, anyway?  What's wrong with water and green trees?  (I summarise, in brief, the aforementioned reviews/discussion).  I could say, of course, that it is almost always a mistake for a person to try and write too violently against their own grain.  Doughty, for an instance, was an odd writer, creatively strange, stuck in weird ruts of his own that other people found rather baffling, ornate, clever, desertstruck ... what would it have benefitted him if he'd been persuaded by contemporary reviews not to be so odd?  I'd say Nick Gevers (below) gets it right with Headless, as far as the book's oddity is concerned.  There was a New Weird, briefly.  Any chance of a New Odd?

Then my ponderings took another direction: my next Gollancz novel, Swiftly, is not a desert novel at all.  It is, on the contrary, and in a rather peculiar and exaggerated manner, a novel about fertility.  Certainly about fertiliser, in Rabelaisian (or at least Bakhtin's version of Rabelais) mode.  My forthcoming Solaris novel, Splinter, starts in a desert, but very quickly smashes it up and replaces it with something again rather aggressively fertile.  It might seem a little belated on my part, only now to be seeing larger patterns in the way my books are coming out.  But then again, writing is a balance between what the writer plans and what emerges, in aleatory or at least subconscious tension with the Apolline planning.  Perhaps there's some tectonic shifting happening under my very own feet, and I'm only slowly becoming aware of it.  Maybe, and without directly informing me, my creative imagination has had enough of deserts for the time being.  Maybe there will be some explosive growth, elephants bursting out of the Narnian ground and so on.  Who can tell?Gradisil, Headless, Swiftly, The Snow, writing

Tricky, tricky Mr Roberts.  He's a tough one to evaluate.  An accomplished sculptor of prose and a cunning satirist, Roberts writes playful SF with concepts so high, you sometimes need a stool to get them down from the shelf. ... There's a part of me that loves Roberts' output: it's all that SF should be, packed with brilliant ideas and clever--

No!  There it is again.

--clever examinations of the human condition.  Land of the Headless does both, taking the hero Jon Cavala on a painful road of self-discovery before finally, finally his eyes are opened to his inner self.  But he can be a plodding read.  Roberts is unquestionably a good writer, so much so that he feels he can happily stuff a paragraph with analogies and similes until it chokes on literary merit, and this is bad.  It slows the pace right down, as do the long discursive sections (which, to be fair, are an integral part of the tale) and it all robs the story of vitality.  There's an additional annoyance with Land of the Headless, in that you'd quite happily cut Cavala's head off yourself.  He's the most pompous ass since Lucius Apuleius and though the story is concerned with his enlightenment, spending 275 pages with Cavala's morbid whining is not easy.  Of course, it's all a very clever--

Dammit.

--a very clever parable on perspective, makes sly use of the picaresque form, and has a good deal of satire on fundamentalist societies (and the woe-filled self-pitying mentality of writers, for that matter).  Cavala's character is at the very heart of this, but that doesn't mean you don't want to thump him, a desire shared by, and acted upon, by quite a few of the other characters too.  Do persevere, though.  For Cavala's salvation, when it finally comes, is a satisfying experience, and there are many great ideas in here, so hats off, if not heads, to Roberts.

So no more cleverness for me; and no writing that does anything other than move narrative forward.  And only likeable, Stepford-wifely characters too.  It's an interesting review, actually; that could either be summarised (for, say, blurbing purposes) like this:

[Roberts is] an accomplished sculptor of prose and a cunning satirist … all that SF should be, packed with brilliant ideas and clever examinations of the human condition.

or like this:

tough … plodding … bad … slow.

I know which one I prefer.  On the other hand, Deathray likes the 'Swiftly' story included in Keith Brooke and Nick Gevers' Infinity Plus anthology, also reviewed in this issue: 'one suspects,' says Haley, 'Roberts is referencing Candide with Land of the Headless ... [he] has played with early modern literature before--witness his excellent story 'Swiftly' (see the Infinity Plus review) a clever story that ...'

Oh.  Damn.

Ah well, let's turn to the the Infinity Plus review itself, and see whether it specifically mentions my story.  It's by Matt Keefe, and it does mention the tale!  'One man struggles to free Lilliputians from slavery in a clever follow-up to Swift's Gulliver's T....'

Oh.Headless, Swiftly

sf criticism

‘... grotesque satire of religious fundamentalism. Thoroughly engrossing . . . deeply affecting . . . impressively visceral . . . nightmarishly gripping . . . fiercely intelligent. While Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion only annoyed the faithful, this novel aims to fry their brains’

STARBURST (five star review)Headless

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 Roberts exploits it in bravura fashion, reflecting soberly on economic marginalization and segregation even as he segues into elaborate farce in the manner of Robert Sheckley. That the literary touchstone of the novel is Marcel Proust adds a further strain of inspired oddness ... [The Hero Cavala] is a Proustian narrator, profoundly reflective and egregiously memorious; and thus Roberts achieves his remarkable juxtaposition of fraught inner turmoil and zany outward satire, escaping the usual superficiality of satirical characterization with admirable dexterity. Psychological depth in a picaresque protagonist: most unusual and very welcome. It’s a crazy scheme but it works; in line with Proustian concerns of memory, Cavala remembers not only himself but much of the central matter of the ‘50s satirical SF of Sheckley, Bester, Pohl and Kornbluth, and that revival is aesthetically very pleasing.

Headless

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 in a world governed by an extreme interpretation of Islamic law – though Roberts synthesises it with a fundamentalist Christianity heavy on old Testament values – but then continues to live , thanks to prosthetic senses and an ordinator fixed to his spine. John Cavala, the beheaded poet, finds himself in the army. His real journey though, is into the morality of the society that has punished him. Roberts provides more sympathetic voices and plausible arguments than might be expected from his satirical theme. How innocent, we begin to wonder, is Cavala? All adultery is rape in this world, but what of his crime? He uses words to defend, deceive, justify and condemn himself; so does literalist religion. This is a subtle parable, in a grave, perfectly appropriate voice.

Headless

And this morning, the postman rang the doorbell to hand-over a smaller parcel, containing five copies of Sternensturm:

Just as handsome, no?  That's the new translation of Polystom, you see.  Mein maschinell übersetzter Deutscher übersetztes Deutsche ist unzulänglich, meine Aufregung und Freude auszudrücken, wie Sie sehen können.Translations

As a coda to my catch-up posts, and a prelude to some proper Book-and-Story-related posting over the coming months, I thought I'd say a little something about my blogging. There are two things to say here.

One is that I continue to contribute to the group-blog The Valve. If you go there right now you'll see a post about Sir Isumbras, crossing the ford, that has a little to say about Millais' spendid picture (above) and more to say about a medieval poem on the same subject. Though it sometimes gets a little crispy in the comments threads, The Valve is a first-rate and top-of-the-notch organ for a wide range of interesting posts. Here's what I do: about once a week--this last term, on account of my timetabling, it tended to be the Thursday or Friday of the week; over this summer it'll probably be earlier in the week--I'll put up a post on anything that takes my fancy, usually literary.

Now, in addition to that blog, I started three personal blogs sometime last year. You can see them over there on the right, listed in the sidebar as 'Other Roberts blogs' above the blogroll.

In the beginning I kept all three of these secret, not because there's anything particularly private in any of them, but because I was intrigued by the idea of something so very well hidden (perfectly unlocatable in the first month or so) in such very plain sight (visible to anybody in the entire world, provided only they were online and knew where to look ...) For about a month these blogs were invisible even to Argus-eyed google. Fine. Then little bits and pieces of them started--how, I know not--to show up on certain kinds of google search. Then various people found them, linked to them even. Nobody reads them, of course, and why should they? But that doesn't bother me: the long near-unbroken string of 'no comments' subtitles has a pure, unsullied look to me, and being unread stops me getting self-conscious about what I write. But the time has probably past when there's any merit in keeping them secret anymore. So, such as they are, here they be:

Europrogocontestovision is a blog of pretentious apothegms, vatic statements, general prog-ness and occasional, but not very well-written, poetry. Good for a writer to have an outlet for all that sort of stuff, I feel, and this is mine. It is updated daily.

Rambling Ad Rumpo is me rambling on, online-diary style. I trust the name of it doesn't need explaining to anybody. This blog is updated, give or take, weekly.

Punkadiddle is a blog of bits and pieces and orts and scraps of writing, writing-related stuff and some pictures. It is updated if and when. Which is not all that often, in fact.

So, the picture at the top there: three figures on the horse (a big pompously-dressed one, an alarmed-looking smaller one, and a tiny one clinging on just-about). The horse is the internet itself. The three figures are my blogs. The visual analogy is strained. The horse is too big. The ford looks shallow enough to walk across without needing a brobdingnagian horse to carry you anyway.

And that is probably enough about blogging for now.blogging, Chatter

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.Headless

 

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 a very good thing indeed.  Their website has this picture of me apparently having a seizure of some kind whilst reading from one of my books.  I don't photograph well, actually, and that's one of the better images of me available.  Which tells you a lot.Splinter, Verne

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 art:

It's an image you'll find elsewhere on this site, but it's so lovely I can't stop myself reproducing it here on the front page.  Pyr's page for the book has various reviews and other info.  And do you know what?  There's also a Pyr blog.  And editor Lou Anders, a man whose taste is as close to impeccable as the sublunary world of sf allows, has a blog of his own.  [The Antithetical stillsmallvoice says: "Lou is a man whose taste is as close to impeccable as any in the world of sf, is he?  You say that only because he had the good taste to buy one of your novels."  To which I reply: "on the contrary; there are many novels by me he has not bought.  But he has bought a series of genuinely brilliant UK sf titles, all of which are worth your attention.  So ner-ner-n'ner-ner, Antithetical stillsmallvoice, put that in your pipe and smoke it."  We have a love-hate thing going on, my Antithetical stillsmallvoice and I.]

The other piece of Gradisil news is that it was shortlisted for the 2007 Arthur C Clarke Award.  Which was nice.

 Didn't win.  But still.Gradisil

Meanwhile why not go add your ha'pennorth of beautiful English to a group-translate of Mallarmé?  Feel free.Chatter

It’s not out just yet, and won't be until September 2007, but I'm pretty thoroughly excited by this, I must say. No cover art as yet, but I'll post it up here as soon as I get a look at it.

One piece of cover art that has come through is for Farah Mendlesohn’s forthcoming collection of stories designed to bait the illiberal and ill-advised governmental legislation making Glorifying Terrorism an offence. Into prison, then, with people celebrating George Washington, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi or Boudica; starting with Alan Moore for V for Vendetta.

I got a chance to read the stories for this collection when I was sent the pdf of the whole thing in order to proof-read my contribution; and I can say that my piece is the least amongst a number of very strong reasons to buy this book when it comes out, amongst them pieces by: Ken Macleod; Gwyneth Jones; Hal Duncan; Charles Stross and Suzette Haden Elgin. You really need to get hold of this anthology, believe me. Start placing advance orders now. I command you.British SF, Farah Mendlesohn, Glorifying Terrorism Anthology, Solaris Books, Splinter

Other news, I've been revising Land of the Headless, and putting the finishing touches to Swiftly, this latter, by the way, one of the best things I've done. One other thing for now, and more substantial writing/publishing updates in a fortnight. I've started blogging. As you know, I've been part of the group blog at The Valve for a while now. But I've finally pushed the boat out and started a blog of my own. Actually, I've started three blogs. One, with a proggy sort of name, is updated daily and is the repository of my more pretentious, or profound, apothegmatic observations. A second, named for the diddly and punky twist of my mind, is for fiction and pictures. A third, named for a character from Round the Horne, is a diary-style blog. These three have been up for a month or so now, and I shall continue them into the indefinite future.Headless, Swiftly, Translations, Valve

A new novel. Land of the Headless. Here’s an early draft of the cover. It should be something like this, give or take the correction of a typo or so.

Anyway, we can agree: it's handsome. It's green.

I talk about the book a little in the writing section of my site. This project is going through the editorial process as we speak. (Not that we are, you know, speaking. Metaphorically, you know.) I’m working through what will be the fourth draft, or so, and hope to be completed soon. The book should be out next summer.Headless

A new parody. Doctor Whom, or E.T. Shoots and Leaves, about a grammatically correct time lord. He’s trying to keep the ‘grammar’ of time in order, so that trifling things like ‘cause and effect’ are not wholly undermined. That’s not a dalek on the cover, by the way. It’s something else. Something that does not in any way breach BBC copyright.

The book is in part a parody of Dr Who, of course (not an easy call, given that Dr Who is already, in itself, a kind of parody); but also a parody of a certain popular grammar book, the author of which has not proved happy to be parodied by myself or anybody else.

 
A story in Pete Crowther’s latest collection, Forbidden Planets. My tale is called ‘Me:topia’ and starts with a spaceship crashing onto an unknown and (as you might guess from the title of the collection) forbidden world. The writing's a little fancy, but as author I try to keep a weather-eye on maintaining the appropriate quota of explosions, chase, exploration and general sfnal excitements and brouhaha.  [2007 update: Pete's Collection made the Locus Recommended List for 2006; and my story made the list too, under 'novelettes'.  Which was nice.]

With today’s post arrived Paul Kincaid and Andrew M. Butler’s collection of critical essays on The Arthur C Clarke Award : one essay per Clarke Award winner, over the last 18 years. I’ve an essay in here on the stonking Fairyland by the estimable Paul McAuley which won the award in 1996 (Such a brilliant novel; such a gifted writer). But my essay on the novel is the least of many excellent reasons to buy this collection; quite apart from the range and insights of the other contributors, all profits go to the Serendip Foundation, which will help keep the Award alive. Buy the book, or go to the Foundation’s website and make a donation. I command you!British SF, parodies, sf criticism, short fiction