Tag Results: Gradisil
French Gradisil
By Adam Roberts | February 19, 2008
Categories: Book News
Ceci c'est la couverture de la prochaine édition en français de mon roman, publiée par le formidable Bragelonne. Belle, non?
As you can see, my French is fairly ropey. Luckily the expert literary French of Elisabeth Vonaburg, who has undertaken this translation, is not. She and I were in correspondence during the process, and I have the highest respect for her. Can't wait to get my hands on an actual copy.
Give me sf-prize or give me death …
By Adam Roberts | September 10, 2007
Categories: Book News
I learn today that Gradisil has been nominated by LFS members for the 2008 Prometheus Award in the Best Novel category. The Best Novel winner receives a one-ounce gold coin and a plaque, presented at the World Science Fiction Convention.
The nomination is the first part of a lengthy process; a ten-person committee whittles the nominees down to finalists, and thence to a winner; but neverthless ... excellent news!
Back
By Adam Roberts | August 14, 2007
Categories: Chitchat
Been away. Back now. Big pile of papers on the welcome mat when we turned the key and tried to swing the door, making it hard to open more than a sliver. Most of this pile was free newspapers, fliers, junk mail and the like. Some was more substantial material that needs dealing with. I've also been spending the day slowly getting a sense of the enormity of pile of outstanding emails I now must process.
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?
Catch-up 1
By Adam Roberts | May 26, 2007
Categories: Book News
After so long a period of desuetude I suppose I ought to provide a couple of catch-up posts. Let you know what's new, and what's been happening so far in 2007. And today the catch-up concerns Gradisil.
Following its 2006 UK publication Gradi was picked up by the top-drawer US press Pyr, and published over there with the following superb cover 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.
30th June 2006. Birthday.
By Adam Roberts | June 30, 2006
Categories: Book News
So, yes, forty-one. There you go. Is there news?
Yes, there is news. Gradisil continues to be reviewed, sometimes very flatteringly, as is the case on Emerald City. Gosh, EmCit has never before been so nice to me. I’m not quite sure what to say. Lou Anders picks up on the review too, and bigs-up Justina Robson’s new one too. Justina and I are Arvon-ing from August 28th to September 2nd.
Writing. Still writing. I revised and, to be honest, quite thoroughly rewrote a novel I was previously calling A Splinter of the World, adding ten thousand words or so and provisionally retitling it Hector in the process, for Nightshade Books, hopefully for publication in 2007. Land of the Headless is still with my editor, Simon Spanton, at Orionbooks. A new novel, A Solid Gold Penny, is almost complete in first-draft form.
And I’m still writing for the Valve: on Hamburger, Seneca, prosody, Star Wars, music and religion, things like that. Go and see.
Reviews of Gradisil
By Adam Roberts | March 17, 2006
Categories: Book News
Jon Courtenay Grimwood in the Guardian (scroll down, you know): 150 whole words. He thinks it 'Classic Roberts', which is either very good or bad. Lisa Tuttle in the Times is also flattering, and manages a few, but only a few, more words.
Pity these reviewers compelled to squeeze their thoughts into such tiny boxes (I say this knowing too well that my last review, of the Arthur C Clarke Shortlist, ran to nearly 10,000 words). A review has appeared in SFX, saying only nice things ('It all adds up to proof, if proof were needed, that Roberts belongs in the first rank of hard SF writers') but still only giving me four stars out of five, chiz chiz, where's the extra star gone etc etc? Starburst also ha' reviewed me.
What else is new? Still in Staines. Still writing. I was in Wales for a week, on holiday, with my family. I read Ulysses again; it was indeed bracing and striking to undertake an intensive one-week re-read of the big old novel. I was struck by how brilliant everything is up until Nausicaa episode, and how flabby and self-indulgent and 'see how clever I am' it gets after that. Penelope excluded, naturally.
One more thing. I am appearing at R:Fest, the Runnymede Literary Festival. I'll be running a SF writing workshop, 2:00-3:30 pm, Saturday 22 April, at Royal Holloway College, Egham Hill, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX. And in the evening of the same day (5:00-6:30pm) I'll be lecturing on the subject of leaving the planet behind. Do come. Do.
Here it is at last the distinguished thing
By Adam Roberts | February 23, 2006
Categories: Book News
My advance copies of Gradisil arrive. How beautiful they look!
Now isn't that a beautiful cover?
There's more about this in writing section of this website.
Two small notes
By Adam Roberts | February 17, 2006
Categories: Book News
A couple more publications to note, after the manner of the small publications that are nevertheless worthy of note. One is this collection of original essays that essay the task of Reading The Lord of the Rings, edited by my colleague and friend Robert Eaglestone. My essay, ‘The One Ring’, asks and answers the question: why did Tolkien choose what amounts to a wedding band as the symbol for ultimate evil in his imaginary world? Given his own happy marriage, and his conservative Catholic views on the sanctity and importance of married life, this might be thought an odd thing to do. What’s the answer? Buy the book, and you’ll find out not only that, but many other things as well. Interesting things. Good things.
The second thing is this, second edition of my Routledge ‘New Critical Idiom’ book on Science Fiction. This revises and corrects the many (lamentably far too many) errors of the first edition. Chapter II, ‘The History of Science Fiction’, has been pretty much wholly rewritten, to take account of the fact that my views changed after researching and writing this much longer volume. There’s a wholly new Chapter VI, on metaphor and SF. There are many many amendments, new bits and pieces; it’s practically a whole new book. And they’ve added a little circle that says ‘2nd edition’ to the cover. And they’ve changed the strip illustration at the bottom to the handsome purplish design you can see. The little bobbly dots on the black part of the cover, however, are the fault of my scanner, not of the original Routledge designer.
That’s enough book news for today. The next update will follow in a few days more, when I receive the first advance copy of Gradisil, whereupon I promise to comment my thoughts upon this large new novel of mine.
Holiday
By Adam Roberts | July 30, 2005
Categories: Book News
Despite the fact that we live almost exactly on the perimeter of Heathrow airport we're having to fly from Luton, because no plane from Heathrow flies anywhere near where we want to go. Crazy, yes? And despite the fact that I would gladly have paid any airline regular prices rather than go on rubbishy Ryan air, we're flying Ryanair because they're the only airline that goes to Nimes. So there you are.
In the meantime, Gradisil has gone off to be copyedited. And this came through yesterday, the cover of the Palgrave Critical History of SF. Sorry it's such incredibly rubbish quality. Don't know why it is, or how to sort it out, except that where most of my image files for this website are a few thousand bits (bites?) this one is over a million, which should surely mean that it's of a far higher quality, instead of looking like it's been strained through muslin and into the eyes of a myopic dog. Ah well. It won't be black and white when it's published. It'll be, I think, greeny-ish and white. But there it is, in all its Verne-derived glory. You can see the little turdus-shaped spaceship, just below and to the left of the moon.
West Memphis 3
By Adam Roberts | November 10, 2004
Categories: Book News
An original story of mine ('The Afterlives of SweetDeath') is the least of many reasons to buy the truly excellent collection The Last Pentacle of the Sun: Writings in Support of the west Memphis Three edited by the estimable M W Anderson and Brett Savory (Arsenal Pulp Press 2004). The volume is designed to raise funds for the West Memphis 3, three young men wrongly convicted of a horrible multiple-murder. If you don't know about this notorious miscarriage of justice go to wm3.org and find out more. The book is a very handsome volume, and contains many wonderful things by, amongst others, Clive Barker, Peter Straub and Poppy Z Brite.
Other recent publications include a couple of reworked and reprinted TAO columns in Lou Anders (ed) Projections: Science Fiction in Literature and Film (Monkeybrain Books 2004). Twenty-eight big names offer really interesting opinions on aspects of SFF from Lord of the Rings to X Men and all stations, literary as well as cinematic, in between. My pieces on the Matrix and Delany are far from the most interesting or the best things in the collection, but that shouldn't stop you buying the collection.
There's also a short new short at Infinityplus: 'The War in Another World'; kind of Wells-y, kind of Gulfwar-y.
Work forthcoming and in progress: Lou Anders has bought a story of mine 'Man you gotta go' for his next collection of original fiction Futureshocks (to be published by Roc). Another story of mine should be appearing in Pete Crowther's Postscripts magazine (it's slated for the third issue).
Otherwise I'm working like a dervish to finish off the Palgrave Critical History of Science Fiction, all 150,000 words of it, due in by the end of the year. Ha! Ha-ha!
In the moments when I'm not slogging at that I'm working intermittently on my next novel, Gradisil. which is my version of a Harder SF topic, the colonisation of space in the near future. Its initial premise is a ground-up technology that enables cheap access to space. This means that a new 'upland' is colonised by various well-off individuals (rather than by governments or corporations, although they soon try and get in on the act). But I'm not writing it as a gung-ho exercise in Ben Bova, Larry Niven or even Kim Stanley Robinson Hard SF. 'Gradisil' is the main character, named from a misunderstanding of the word Yggdrasil; which is to say, it is really a book about trees: the Earth's magnetic field as a type of Yggdrasil for one, on whose branches people climb into orbit. Family trees for another (it's a novel that spans several generations, and I'm interested in the way generations of a family relate to one another, how the stories and mores of the older generations get taken up, or not, by the younger). But above all it's a novel about the way big things grow from small things. It's a 'Birth of a Nation' story. Or so I hope.
Enough of my yakking. En avant.