Tag Results: sf criticism
BBC History Magazine on History of SF
By Adam Roberts | January 4, 2008
Categories: Lit Crit
Start a post title with an abbreviation + the-word-History, end it palindromically, with the-word-History + an abbreviation, that's my motto. This is courtesy of Stephen Baxter, a giant of contemporary sf (to my Lilliputianiarity) and a friend to boot: he is, I'm guessing, a subscriber to BBC History Magazine, and he spotted this in the January 08 issue. The reviewer is Paul Parsons:
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.
Palgrave History of Science Fiction: paperback
By Adam Roberts | July 14, 2007
Categories: Lit Crit
Here's the cover for the forthcoming paperback edition of my Palgrave History of Science of Fiction:
New Publications
By Adam Roberts | October 4, 2006
Categories: Book News
And here you go.
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!
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.
The Palgrave History of Science Fiction
By Adam Roberts | December 15, 2005
Categories: Book News
After many years of anxious labour, the Palgrave History of Science Fiction is delivered. And what a bonny big bouncing baby it is: so many close printed pages, half a dozen half-tone illustrations, footnotes, timeline, index, the whole kit and caboodle. Naturally the first page I open, at random, has a typo right in the middle (page 81 since you ask). But one typo out of one hundred and fifty thousand words, many many hundreds of individual SF texts and works of criticism, not to mention films, tv, video games, pop music, fan culture … maybe it’s not so bad.
Why not come right out and say it: I’m proud of this big book; proud in the good sense of the word, rather than the bad sense. It’s not even a fat book, for the people at Palgrave have managed to squeeze its eighth-of-a-million words into a mere 368 handsomely-proportioned tiny-printed pages. But it really does represent a whole lot of work. A whole lot.
Labour of love, you see.
The idea of this history is to cover everything, not just twentieth century literary sf. And there’s a thesis here too; a fairly original one I think. After much thought I decided I disagreed with the opinions of other learned scholars in the field of SF studies: that, for instance, that SF as a genre dates back to Hugo Gernsback, or to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In fact there was plenty of science fiction, in novel form, in the world of Ancient Greece; and from about 1600 to the present there’s an unbroken river of SF writing. Why there was a millennial hiatus in SF, and what happened in 1600 to give birth to the modern form of the genre, is what I argue in my study. Why not check it out for yourself?
Back from abroad
By Adam Roberts | August 18, 2005
Categories: Book News
Since it has become a tenet of my writing practice that I never get nominated for awards, and given that I compensate for this fact psychologically by telling myself how unimportant awards are, how the best writers never got/get them, how the fact that I'm never nominated is a testament to a global conspiracy against me by the Knights Templar and the Masons (rather than, oooh I don't know, that my books are crap, perish the thought) -- bearing all this in mind, I've been surprised by how chuffed I am at getting a 2005 British Fantasy award nomination for my short story 'Roads Were Burning'. Even the fact that I almost certainly won't win doesn't take the shine off it. [10 October update: And in the event I didn't get the award; ah well.]
In other news, I have had feedback that the cover-image posted below for the Palgrave Critical History of Science Fiction was bad, very bad, bad yes bad. One comment: 'it looks like a spontaneous aggregation of dalmations of something'. Now I can't deny that the image below is crap, something which reflects my inadequacies as a webmaster. Rather than erase it, I shall let it stand to keep me humble in the face of my failings; but it's probably worth posting better images. This, for instance, is how the book is being bigged-up by the publishers Palgrave themselves. Nice, eh?
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.