Tag Results: short fiction
Celebration
By Adam Roberts | April 11, 2008
Categories: Book News
In the post yesterday, my contributor's copy of Ian Whates's splendid bsfa anthology of original fiction, Celebration (My contribution is called 'The Man of the Strong Arm'):
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.
Infinity Plus Anthology
By Adam Roberts | August 24, 2007
Categories: Book News
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.
disLOCATIONS
By Adam Roberts | August 14, 2007
Categories: Book News
One title sitting on the mat and waiting for me was this one: a handsome little volume edited by Ian Whates and containing stories by ... well you can see the list of names there, at the bottom. My story is called 'Remorse', and is short and clever; but there are several really excellent pieces in this, not least two very strong stories from Pat Cadigan and Ken Macleod. Worth checking out; maybe even buying ... wouldn't you say?
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!
Some new titles
By Adam Roberts | February 1, 2005
Categories: Book News
Two very handsome volumes arrived in the post. One is Constellations: the Best of the New British SF, edited by Pete Crowther (New York: Daw Books 2005) available currently at the frankly astonishing price of £3.73 from Amazon.co.uk. The theme of the collection is evident from its title, and Pete's introduction makes plain that he didn't start out intending to make a Brit-only collection, it just worked out that way. I'm happy with my own story, the rather chilly 'The Order of Things' -- one of my better stories, I think (the Foucauldian title only partly reflects the burden of the tale). But a much better reason to buy the volume is the high overall quality; several tales in particular are just superb. much better than mine: Stephen Baxter's 'Lakes of Light' is the very best of them; most novels published in the genre today have smaller ideas and less compelling workings-out than this short story. Roger Levy's haunting 'No Cure For Love' and Justina Robson's moving 'The Little Bear' are also excellent.
The other is The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures, edited by Mike Ashley and Eric Brown (Carroll & Graf/Robinson 2005). The brief here was to write stories that continued or otherwise riffed-upon classic Verne originals; and a largely Brit crew of authors has risen to the challenge. Some of the tales are ripping, doing the derring-do thing, like Ian Watson's storming 'Giant Dwarfs', which revists Journey to the Centre of the Earth and finds occultist Nazis and strange time-travel goings-on. Some are more considered, or more jocular. James Lovegrove manages, sneakily, to insert a whole, wonderfully imaginative novel into the short story format by printing only fragments (which the reader easily stitches together in his/her imagination) of a fictional lost Verne novel 'Londres au XX!e Siecle'. My own piece picks up on a practically unknown Verne title, but one of my favourites: Hector Servadac.
I've also had a strange but intriguing email from a gentleman (at least, I assume the person in question is male ...) called Vole Pogrom, proposing a jointly-authored project. I'm mulling over the ideas Mr (Mrs?) Pogrom has suggested, and will report back soon.
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.