Tag Results: Splinter
Post-Weird Thoughts on Splinter
By Adam Roberts | June 18, 2008
Categories: Book News
As Mark Newton notes, there's a fine and detailed analysis of Splinter over at Post-Weird Thoughts.
Intricate and vivid ... very well written, Splinter is not only a page-turner, but it´s also a veritable meditation on how one can choose to cope with a situation (any situation) or simply remain apart, but never entirely aside of it. It´s an elegant twist of the old Eldridge Cleaver saying 'You're either part of the solution or you're part of the problem'. Hector is torn apart for not knowing even if there is a problem in the first place - but he chooses not to discover the truth. And that´s his undoing.
Post-Weird Thoughts is Fábio Fernandes, and his blog is an excellent one.
New Splinter cover-art
By Adam Roberts | June 3, 2008
Categories: Book News
That's the cover-art for the mass-market paperback edition of Splinter. Nice, what? I'm told they're going to turn the entire world for the finalised version, so that the comet will no longer be heading towards the middle east. That's right -- turn the whole world. Those people at Solaris can do anything.
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).
Guardian on Splinter
By Adam Roberts | September 15, 2007
Categories: Book News
The estimable Eric Brown is complimentary:
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.
Deathray on Splinter
By Adam Roberts | September 5, 2007
Categories: Book News
Deathray is fast becoming my favourite sf magazine, despite (or who knows maybe masochistically because) they're not entirely 100% enamoured of Roberts-mode prose sf. Not 100% disenamoured either; somewhere in the middle. Here's Jes Bickham:
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.
Catch-up 2
By Adam Roberts | May 29, 2007
Categories: Book News
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.
A few roundabout-Christmas things to report
By Adam Roberts | December 28, 2006
Categories: Book News, Short Fiction
The excellent new British SF press Solaris have issued a press release about my forthcoming new novel, Splinter.
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.