Adam Roberts's Blog, page 13
April 14, 2015
Looking forward: 2016
Nothing finalised yet, but it looks like this could be an early-ish 2016 release.
Looking Back: 2014
Now that the awards season is out of the way, time for a little reflection.
2014 was a good year for me, creatively. I appreciate that I write a certain kind of novel, and its not a kind of novel that delights all comers. That said, I would say that in Bête I achieved a greater proportion of what I was setting out to do than in any previous novel of mine. It ended up a weirdly personal novel, actually, which makes it harder than it might otherwise be for me to gauge. Nonetheless I stand by what I say in the book's afterword, that it is the best of me. I also published a bunch of short stories, including a few (I'm thinking of 'Trademark Bugs' and 'The Assassination of Isaac Newton by the Coward Robert Boyle' in particular) that are surely the best I've ever done. I was proud, too, to see the publication of Sibilant Fricative: Essays and Reviews, since that seems to me my best literary-critical engagement with genre: a judgement endorsed by the recent Vector review. I published a How To Write SF and Fantasy book that was OK; I blogged a great deal and occasionally with insight.
Naturally it's dispiriting for me on a personal level that the many awards with which SF is supplied passed over all of this is silence; but that really is only a personal, and not a community, disappointment. That would be true in any year, but this year in particular the community has reasons to be disappointed with its awards that have nothing to do with me. Decent shortlists by the Kitschies, BSFA and Clarke panels have been rather overwhelmed by the shameful hijacking of the Hugos. I find myself doubting if the Hugos can survive this year with their credibility intact in any meaningful sense, which is a shame. But there are lots of other awards, and the SFF as a whole needs to decide which methods (plural, one hopes) of indicating esteem it wishes to invest in, post-Hugos.
To revert to the personal, there's a moral to be drawn from this awards wash-out of mine: I mean, with respect to the business of working as a writer. There are so many opportunities for discouragement and despair in the writer's life that any writer needs to have if not a strategy then at least some supply of inner grit to deal with failure, or s/he will not last very long. Failure will come, after all, and often. Now, Grit is not my middle name, and failure of the sort I'm talking about in this post is inevitably a personally painful matter. But pain is not the end of the world. This is the second year, now, in which SF award shortlists (in all their multiplicity) have gone forth to the world wholly uncontaminated by anything of mine, and it is starting to look like a trend. The hard part is acknowledging that it's nothing personal, it encapsulates no moral or ideological judgement on me, my opinions, my political allegiance and so on. Awards are attempts to look at the whole scene, not just your work; if other people on the scene are producing excellent work that doesn't make your work worthless: Billy Bragg has that great truth of life down pat. The hardness, here, inheres in accepting that the only proper response to my disappointment is to write better stuff. And write better stuff is never a bad mantra for any author to pin over his/her desk. Indeed, there's a kind of weird synchronism in this, since failure, impotence, disappointment and anger are so often what I write about. I can hardly complain. Plus the 'Great Hugo Disaster of 2015' shows that awards are very far from being infallible guides to aesthetic merit. There's one other upside: failure can be freeing. If a community rewards a writer for a certain kind of writing, it imposes a tacit responsibility on the writer, this is what we like, this is what we want. If a community withholds its esteem, then the writer is perfectly unobligated. Broadly, my view is twofold: one, that any individual award slate, or any single year of awards, does not provide a statistically significant judgement upon one's work; and two that being left off the shortlist for an award that recognises merit is not the same thing as being shortlisted for a Razzies-style gong that identifies demerit. Maybe your book, story or work of criticism was almost, but not quite, good enough for the slate. Nil desperandum. Fail again, fail better. Next year in Jerusalem. And so on.
It's good to be honest about these things, and honesty is almost never the same thing as self-laceration. By the same token, if individual award slates don't constitute a statistically reliable datum, whole runs of such awards, especially spread across many different award-giving bodies, probably do. And whilst not making any given shortlist doesn't represent focussed dispraise, it is hard not to take it personally when your work is singled out for elimination from a ballot whilst equivalent works are permitted to remain and indeed make the shortlist (as happened with the Sib Fric volume). So my sense of disappointment in myself is most sharply biting where my non-fiction, reviews and essays are concerned. I've been reviewing, blogging and writing critically about SF and Fantasy since the last century. Insofar that awards are indices of community esteem, this larger body of work has been in effect judged not estimable. It's something with which I have to come to terms, and that means recognising the ways and the extent to which I have failed.
It is freeing, in one sense. Blogging and writing unpaid reviews on genre titles has been a very laborious process, especially over the last decade or so; and stopping doing so would free up time and energy for other things. When I wound-up my blog Punkadiddle I was thinking along those lines; and though it pains me to admit, it was probably a mistake to have talked-myself into giving it another go with the Sibilant Fricative blog. But admitting defeat is admitting that one is fatigable, which can be a difficult accommodation to come to with one's ego. Nor do I plan to stop writing SF criticism right away. I have a number of projects en train, as the French say, amongst them a revised version of my award-unwinning Palgrave History of Science Fiction (to mark the tenth anniversary of its publication) and a Newcon press edition of my reviews of 2014 titles. I've also got about half a book on Ian Watson written, and would like to finish that, and several essays promised to collections or proceedings of conferences. So lots to do.
Otherwise I can look forward. My next novel, or at least the manuscript currently with my editor, is a larger and more ambitious book than I have ever written before. If I have to deal with a sense of failure where my critical writing is concerned, creatively I can say without (I hope) hubris that I've never felt so confident in what I'm capable of as a writer. Next year, maybe, in Jerusalem. Perhaps.
February 24, 2015
Jews versus Zombies
Rebecca Levene and Lavie Tidhar have edited these two volumes, Jurassic have published them, proceeds will go to a very worthwhile charity, and you can buy either (or both!) here. It's e-book only at the moment, but a limited edition hard copy is coming, and perhaps an omnibus. Zombies contains my story 'Zayinim', over which I laboured and struggled over a period of many months, honing and polishing the sentences, adjusting the structure, refining the narratorial voice and undertaking solid weeks of detailed zom/hebie research. I hope you like the result.
February 1, 2015
Locus: Best SF/Fantasy of 2014
The complete list is here. I was delighted to see Bête listed amongst the (very strong) list of best novels; and doubly-delighted that Sibilant Fricative: Essays & Reviews is listed amongst 'Best Non-Fiction'. Triple delight awaited me when I saw that “Thing and Sick” (originally in Solaris Rising 3) is listed amongst the 'Best Novelettes'. Good gracious, if I were to carry on looking down this list, and found yet another of my 2014 titles, perhaps the short story 'Trademark Bugs: A Legal History', included as well, well I would reach quadruple delight, and that would have serious health implications for my frail body. So I'll stop.
January 25, 2015
Saint Rebor
A new collection of short stories: available now. I believe there are 150 actual copies for sale, all signed by me; but there's no limit to the number of e-book copies available, and they're only £2.99 a pop. Amazing!
January 21, 2015
Twenty Trillion Leagues: American Edition
The US edition of Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea is out now. That's very exciting news! There's also an audio-book version for download, narrated by Christian Coulson. One more thing. Follow this link -- this one, here -- down, down into the depths of publishing's marianas trench, and you'll find an excerpt of this latter.
December 18, 2014
My Six Best Books of 2014 …
... in a more-literal sense than is usually implied by these sorts of headlines.
1. Bête, a novel: it's the best of me. £6.49 on Kindle; still some hardcover copies left in stock (pricier, but makes a better gift. Look at that cover art! I mean, obviously I can't claim any credit for the cover art. But you have to agree: it is a thing of beauty).
2. Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea, a novel. Gorgeously illustrated by the sublime Mahendra Singh. A piffling £5.49 on Kindle; only four hardcover copies left anywhere in the world. What are you waiting for?
3. Sibilant Fricative, a collection of essays and reviews. I believe that all hardcopies of this title are sold now; so it's Kindle only: but at £3.42 it's a steal. (Many of the pieces in that volume first appeared on my Punkadiddle blog; but I've taken that blog down now, so if you want to read those pieces you gotta buy the book. Cunning, no?)
4. Get Started in: Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy (Teach Yourself: Writing). Freshly published!
5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (Edinburgh University Press). The first new edition since 1983 of this foundational classic of literary criticism; all annotation loose-ends tied up, new facts about the tortured compositional history of the book uncovered, 200-pages of introductory matter. And an eye-wateringly expensive price. What you gonna do? Academic publishing is a strange thing.
6. Landor's Cleanness (Oxford University Press). The best critical monograph on Walter Savage Landor available! Well, strictly speaking, the only critical monograph on Walter Savage Landor available. But that's still something.
---
A: So. That's a lot of books.
R: It is.
A: For one year, I mean.
R: Well, it's not quite as Stakhanovite as it may, at first blush, appear. It's more a reflection of the exigencies of publishing, or more specifically of different kinds of publishing.
A: How so?
R: Well: take the two academic titles. Landor's Cleanness was written 2011-12, and OUP decided they wanted to publish it towards the end of that latter year. If it's taken until October 2014, that's partly because the wheels of academic publish grind slow. The Biographia Edition was also mostly finished by the end of 2012; and revised and readied for the press in 2013. Of all the titles in the photo above it was the one that took the most labour, partly because compiling it and writing the intro was just a laborious business, and partly because the proofing was an immensely painstaking matter. It's a scholarly edition of a classic of English letters; I had to get the text right.
A: Still!
R: Well, except that my day-job is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature, and pursuing research of this kind (Coleridge, Landor) is a large part of that job. Those two titles represent the main focus of my Professorial energies for nearly four years; that they both happen to appear within months of one another is just a coincidence.
A: And the Sibilant Fricative thingy?
R: Again: it's a collection of essays and reviews written over a five year period (indeed a couple of the pieces are even older than that). The labour was in pulling them together, and in that task I was aided by the mighty Ian Whates.
A: Two novels though!
R: That's a little anomalous. I don't usually publish two novels in one year! What happened is that Twenty Trillion was originally slated to appear in late 2013, but got bumped back (in the event I didn't publish a novel in 2013). Bête is the novel I'm conscious of having been writing 2013-14, and it was trickier to write than most of my fiction. Chris Priest called it 'sluttishly freeform', which (I confess) rather pleased me, in part because it means I was able to bury what might otherwise have been too procrustean a substructure (to do with riddles, Sophocles, St John, Mythago Wood, Ted Hughes and a couple of other things).
A: So will there be two novels from you in 2015?
R: As if.
A: And the Get Started In?
R: That was a commission. Being a professional writer means taking commissions seriously (provided only that they are serious commissions; as this was), and therefore finding the time to write them, to spec and as well as you can.
A: So!
R: So.
October 1, 2014
“Eternal Treblinka of the Spotless Soul: Bête by Adam Roberts”
That most excellent critic Niall Alexander has reviewed Bête (in slightly spoilery mode) over at Tor.com. Snip: "This, then, is not some novelty novel, but a fully-fledged philosophical fable for our age. Affectionate albeit barbed, far-fetched yet oddly plausible, and dark, but not without a certain spark, Bête is as smart and as satisfying and as challenging as anything any of the Adam Robertses have written."
September 19, 2014
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