Tag Results: Headless
Vector on Headless
By Adam Roberts | January 27, 2008
Categories: Book News
Discouraging days. Martin McGrath, fluently and rather wittily, decapitates Land of the Headless in the bsfa journal, Vector, with a scimitar-swinging review that begins by invoking not so much a clever albatross as a clever roc, and goes on to find, well, nothing to like about the book at all. His main charge is that the novel fails as satire. I didn’t mean it to be a satire; but that, somehow, only makes the critique more discouraging. Ah well.
Paul Raven on Headless
By Adam Roberts | December 17, 2007
Categories: Book News
At SF Site. The estimable Mr Raven is clear enough that some readers aren't going to like this novel, or the sort of books I write more generally; and he has some fun with the 'clever' albatross; but at the end he has perceptive and positive things to say:
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.
Strange Horizons on Headless, Splinter
By Adam Roberts | October 15, 2007
Categories: Book News
A very intelligent and perceptive (though of course I would say that wouldn't I) review of both Headless and Splinter at the splendid Strange Horizons. It's by Victoria Hoyle, she of the top-notch Eve's Alexandria, the site which no individual interested in new fiction can afford to ignore.
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).
What does Australia think of Headless?
By Adam Roberts | September 18, 2007
Categories: Book News
This:
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.
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?
Deathray on Headless: it’s Clever, Unfortunately
By Adam Roberts | July 25, 2007
Categories: Book News
Deathray you ask? Deathray I say. Guy Haley reviews the novel, and his tagline is: 'Newly headless pompous poet wends painful way to self-discovery in picaresque SF tale that is, at time, too clever by half.' Quite right too: no place for cleverness in SF. Vile quality.
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.
Swift! Orwell! Atwood! Roberts …
By Adam Roberts | July 11, 2007
Categories: Book News
“Land of the Headless is a darkly satirical tale that extrapolates an absurd idea into something weirdly plausible. This is not escapist adventure but a dystopian vision in the tradition of Swift, Orwell and Atwood against the cruellest extremes of human stupidity.”
THE TIMES
‘... 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)
Locus on Headless
By Adam Roberts | July 10, 2007
Categories: Book News
Nick Gevers, LOCUS:
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.
Saturday Telegraph Headless review
By Adam Roberts | July 4, 2007
Categories: Book News
Short enough to be quoted in full, Andrew McKie's Telegraph review of Land of the Headless from Saturday 30th June (also, by pleasant synchronicity, my birthday):
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.
Catch-up 3
By Adam Roberts | June 4, 2007
Categories: Book News
Third of four, to report on my forthcoming Gollancz novel, Land of the Headless. Here it is:
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.
And so 2006 nears its end
By Adam Roberts | December 4, 2006
Categories: Book News
I'm really quite excited by this; the excellent German press Heyne have published translated-into-German versions of several of my parodies; but this is the first of my 'proper novels' to receive this illustrious metamorphosis: Salt from 2000. And what a beautiful cover! One of the handsomest I've seen. So I urge and exhort you to go to Amazon.de, see it in situ and (who knows?) and buy a copy.Lovely, lovely. Also green.
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 Heads-up
By Adam Roberts | November 10, 2006
Categories: Book News
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.
Promised Update
By Adam Roberts | October 18, 2005
Categories: Book News
I said I would update eight days later. I have now updated, exactly eight days later. Happy now?
So you finished your novel, then? Like you promised you would? I finished a draft of it, yes. And where can I find out more about this new novel? Run don't walk to the writing section of this very site.
I have also, partly against my better judgment, decided to post upon this website a picture of what I look like. In case you're interested.
And in other news here's the cover of a fine-looking edition of, as it says, the Major Works of Robert Browning. My name isn't there on the cover, but it's my edition, all save the introduction, which was written by the estimable Danny Karlin, a much better Browningist than I. (I should, perhaps add, then when I say "my name isn't there on the cover" and talk about "my edition" and so on, I'm not implying that they should blazon "ADAM ROBERTS" in large red letters at the top, with Robert Browning in little script at the bottom. That would be vainglorious of me. Obviously I'm prepared to give Browning some of the credit, for, you know, writing the poems.)
Interestingly, the wikipedia link to Browning's name I gave a few lines above includes in its informative article the following cartoon from an 1891 edition of Punch. The tagline to the cartoon, marvellously prolix after the manner of nineteenth-century cartoons, is:
[she to him] "Don't you admire Robert Browning as a poet, Mr. Fitzsnook?"
[he to her] "I used to, once; but everybody admires him now, dontcherknow -- so I've had to give him up!"
When you've finished howling with laughter at that one, look again at the man in the picture. Could it be …? Yes, surely it is Danny Karlin himself. A mere co-incidence? I think not.
Termtime once more
By Adam Roberts | October 10, 2005
Categories: Book News
There's been a pause in the up-dating (sorry, if you're bothered by that kind of thing). Not that I've been idle. We moved house, from a two-bed house in Staines with an outside study (a converted garage, separate from the house, very in-con-wenient in the rain) to a three bedroom house in Staines with an indoor study slightly closer to the train station. It's very exciting. Actually the process of moving house itself is very disruptive and rather exhausting, but it's done now. Nice new house. Very.
After which term started up again, a couple of weeks of build-up and then ram-stam into teaching and the other various hurlie-burlies. But, still, not to forget my Prime Directive ('write! write!' as Carlyle might put it) I have been working. I did some work on, well Euripides, if you must know. To be more specific, I've been doing CSI-style plasticene-head restorations of the dismembered and defaced Telephus, Phaethon and Hypsipyle. No, really. [11 October; certain people have complained that they don't understand what the foregoing, like, means. So, with a sigh, I'll spell it out. Not literal plasticene, of course: the plasticene is a metaphor for textual reconstruction. Yes, we have some Euripidean plays in their entirety, and some we have only as groups of fragments. For a couple of titles we have quite a lot of fragments. I had a go at writing linking matter to stich these fragments together for the three named plays, using our knowledge of the formulaic shape of Greek tragedy (episodes interspersed with choruses) and our knowledge from other sources of how the stories went. It proved quite amazingly addictive, not unlike sudoku, funnily enough ... in the sense of filling in the gaps according to the requirements of the surviving elements. I would tell you about it, if you were really interested, but I'm afraid you'd be bored. And too polite to tell me you're bored, just nodding away with a slightly pixilated smile on your face. I hate those situations.]
Now, there were other things too, like a couple of BenBella things, which are a pleasure to write. I've written, or am in line to pitch something for, The Boy From Krypton (edited by Mark Millar), The Unauthorized X-Men (edited by Len Wein) and Star Wars on Trial (edited by David Brin and Matt Stover). Indeed, my X-Men essay is due right about now, so as soon as I've finished this uploading malarky I'll get right on it.
Otherwise I've been finishing a novel, provisionally called Land of the Headless. I'm enjoying the writing (although, naturally, that doesn't actually mean anything) and another eight days, precisely, will see me finish a draft -- the exactness of ‘eight days' being nothing more than an indication of the exigencies of my teaching week, around which I must bend the drafting of the last couple of thousand words.
Yes I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, ‘but what happened to the good old days of monosyllabic, gruntable, title-I-begrudge-you-a-title wordlump titles? The days of Salt, and On and Ugh! and Ah!? I fear they've long gone. Whilst working on Headless (oh let me call it that, just once, for old time's sake) I've also written about twenty-thousand words of another novel, to be called A Solid Gold Penny, or -- if I can slip it past the eagle-eye of my editor -- A Solid Gold Pennie. So it seems like the tide for long titles has come in, or the tide for short titles has gone out, or possibly both together.
So, yeah, it's Land of the Headless and it's A Solid Gold Penny, a tad splurgy I know. But, I figure, so long as I don't get into The Contrabulous Fabtraption of Professor Horatio Hufnagel territory, then I'm OK.
Enough updating for now. I hereby promise not to let things slipslide for so long before the next update, which, indeed, will be in eight days time. So there.