Adam Roberts's Blog, page 30

Yellow Blue Tibia in the 2009 BSC Book Tournament

BSCreview.com email me to tell me that Yellow Blue Tibia is one of 64 books selected to be voted on in their book tournament for the best new genre release of the year 2009. You can see the details of the tournament . 'We invite you,' they say, 'to encourage your fans to come vote in the tournament on your blog.' So here I am.

A thousand schools of thought contend

This site has been lacking hard news of late; a state of affairs which is about to change. But before it does, a few more boat-trips around the island called The Contemporary Reputation of Yellow Blue Tibia. On the one hand, it's been voted (I'm very pleased) one of sfsite's top 10 titles of the year. Even the estimable Abigail Nussbaum, whom I thought didn't like the novel very much, thinks enough of it to squeeze it on the bottom of her Hugo ballot, which as flattering and pointless...

YBT on BSFA Award Shortlist

I'm more chuffed than a chaffinch (who, I assume, are so-called from their enormous capacity for chuffed-ness) that Yellow Blue Tibia has been shortlisted for the BSFA award. Best of all, just look at the stratospheric calibre of the other three titles! That's pretty pleasing company to be keeping, I don't mind telling you.

'Hair'

Gardner Dozois has selected my story 'Hair' for The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection (due out July 2010). I'm chuffed. 'Hair' originally appeared in Geoff Ryman's superlative When It Changed anthology of original fiction. Why don't you buy a copy?

A Note on Cheryl Morgan

Back in the days when she ran Emerald City Cheryl Morgan read and reviewed some of my writing. She didn't like it, for a number of perfectly valid reasons, which is, of course, fair enough. The thing is: for many readers that would have drawn the line under any further encounter with what I do. There's no shortage of books published, after all, and enough great writers (certainly better than I) continue to produce the sort of thing she does like to mean that she could easily have decided n...

Black Static on Scrooge

Black Static is a fine magazine. Here's what Peter Tennant says about I Am Scrooge in the latest ed:

For his latest trick, respected critic and SF author Adam Roberts has great fun producing a pastiche of Dickens's seasonal classic, A Christmas Carol, and the horror afficionado and more general reader will find much to enjoy between the covers of I Am Scrooge, not least the tasteful line drawings of Zom Leech.

I'll pass those words on to Zom. He'll be chuffed.

At first I found this book...

Twenty ten

What's coming? A couple of things, since you ask. New Model Army is published on the 10th of April. I'd say it is the best thing I have ever written, and by quite a wide margin too. That may, of course, not be saying very much; but it's a big deal for me.

I'll be appearing at the Scarborough Literary Festival on Saturday 17th April (at 1 pm to be precise, with Tom Holt and Peter Guttridge; but otherwise just knocking about that fine town). I don't often do festivals or cons, so this is...

Paul Cornell is a tall, powerfully-built stallion of a man

...with a brain the size of a cement-mixer and taste so impeccable no pecca would come within two thousand miles of it. You can see that this from reading his blog:

My three favourite novels of the year were probably Moxyland by Lauren Beukes, Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts and Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi (going by UK publication dates, that is) ... Yellow Blue Tibia is from that interesting place where a new inflationary universe of SF has sprung up, amongst literary fiction. Some of that...

Miscellaneous

Via this I discover this:

London Evening Standard. The best books of the year: our reviewers name the titles that have meant the most to them over the past 12 months.

FRANCIS SPUFFORD I spent this year finishing a book set in Russia, so I was all ready to delight in the charcoal-black satire of Adam Roberts's Soviet UFO novel Yellow Blue Tibia (Gollancz, £12.95), even before it was tipped as a worthier winner of the Booker than anything on the actual shortlist.

May I not sound too Boraty as I ...

Seventh

Nice to chance upon this. Seven is a magic number, after all.