Adam Roberts's Blog, page 6

Aftermath

So it seems this is now all official and out-in-the-open. Dave Hutchinson, a writer I admire enormously (and I'm pleased to say, a friend) and I have been collaborating on a series of books for Rebellion. This is "The Aftermath" set a century or so after a massive meteor shower wrecked civilisation, as communities slowly struggle out of basic survival into rebuilding something more sustainable. Dave wrote the first volume, Shelter (available 12 June 2018, don't you know); and I've written vol 2, Haven, pictured above. I'll give you more information as and when Rebellion say I'm allowed ...

“By The Pricking of Her Thumb” Cover Re-Reveal!

Here's Blacksheep's Thumb cover again, this time with one less typo! This is the one that will go out to the world.

“By The Pricking Of Her Thumb” Cover Reveal

The designers and artists at the mighty Blacksheep studio have, once again, done me proud. That's the cover to the sequel to Real-Town Murders: also set in future-Reading, another impossible murder for Alma to investigate, this time parsing Kubrick rather than Hitchcock. Now: I know I never write sequels, that I do something new each time I publish a novel. But it occurred to me that, never having written a sequel to any of my books, writing a sequel to one of my books would be doing something new. In this manner I aim to keep one step ahead of myself, going forward.

Verdadeira!

The Portuguese translation of my History of Science Fiction (2nd ed 2016) is now out. I must say: I very much like that cover. Ficção Científica for the win!

What Does Adam Do All Day?

Nice photoshop, no?

I'm a writer, so mostly What I Do All Day is write. Since the part I love most about being a writer is the actual writing, and the parts I enjoy least are all the other stuff, working through edits and doing proofs, pitching ideas and filling in my tax returns, reading swingeing reviews without collapsing in a heap, doing events and public readings and so on, this works out pretty well so far as I'm concerned. If you're thinking of becoming a writer, then I say (a) good luck! and (b) check in your heart that you actually like writing, the process of sitting down and putting words on a page, or a screen. Otherwise this profession will drive you mad. A writer is somebody who writes.

Much of my actual writing takes place in local coffee shops, because that's an environment that works for me (there are too many distractions at home: too much washing to be ironed, dishwasher-loading-and-unloading to work through, hoovering to hoover and so on). The occasional who does he think he's kidding? "working on his screenplay" yeah right glance I get from this or that fellow customer is just the icing on the cake. Mornings are mostly when I write new stuff; afternoons and evenings are when I tend to deal with admin and emails and invoices and so on, when I work on revisions and edits and do all the necessary but tedious para-gubbins. Mornings are more fun.

Yes, para-gubbins is a word. Sure. I'm a writer: I know words.

I work seven days a week; if I don't write on any given day it will only be because there are pressing eventualities compelling my abstinence. If you want, for whatever reason, to imagine me at work, then I invite you to impress the following stock-photo image for 'writer' upon your inner eye, which is the bliss of solitude. I look exactly like this. Exactly.

I am a writer but I'm not a very famous or successful one (not very successful in terms of community esteem, and more to the point not very successful financially speaking). But there are many bills to pay, kids to feed and an eye-wateringing large mortgage to service, so I have a day-job, working at the University of London teaching literature and creative writing. Writing, therefore, fills the time when university work doesn't crowd it out. At the moment I am on research leave, and writing All The Day. Next academic year my writing time will be squeezed, but I'll mountain that molehill later this year rather than right now, thank you very much. Sufficient unto the day, and so on and so forth.

One more thing I do, not on All The Days but on at least Some Of Them: I go about. This, generally, is not paid: I'm talking about readings, signings, events, talks, convention panels and so on. There's the general idea that this is 'publicity' and therefore a Sellar-Yateman-esque Good Thing in and of itself: that it leads, let's say, to enhanced sales, word-of-mouth buzz and through them to fame and respect and riches beyond the dream of Croesus. The truth, of course, is that it doesn't. Last month I did an event co-organised by Wolverhampton Art Gallery and Wolverhampton University: I went up, talked, answered questions, shook a few hands. I wasn't paid, and of the twenty or so (nice, enthusiastic) people who came to the event I guess two or three might have been inspired to buy one of my novels, which by itself won't cover the cost of the petrol I burned pootling up and down the M40. Still: nice to meet enthusiastic people. And sometimes I do these sorts of things because they are worthwhile in a general rather than a propel-Adam-onto-the-bestseller-list sense. So: I talk at schools and libraries where I can, to promote literacy and encourage kids who think they might want to be writers themselves. I have a few times gone into prisons and talked to inmates. Next Wednesday, terrifyingly enough, I'm addressing the Henley-on-Thames Women's Institute on the subject of 'storytelling'. That sort of thing. And last week I went to Vilnius and spoke to some very pleasant Lithuanian fans about Tolkien, and (the following day) about Pratchett. There was no fee there either, although the pleasant Lithuanians did at least pay my flight and accommodation. So that's something else I Do All Day, although as I get older, and less excited by the prospect of travel as such, I have, I think, come to the conclusion that I'll do less of it, going forward. Less travel will mean more time to do the main thing I want to Do All Day, which is read. And write.

Over 2018-19 I'll have less time for travel anyway, since I'll be one of the judging panel for next year's Kitschies. I'll need all the reading time I can squirrel away!

New for Spring

The big news for Spring is that the novel I wrote out of Anthony Burgess's Black Prince screenplay, working with his idea of doing the 14th-century in the style of Dos Passos, is going to be published. Over at Unbound enough pledges have been obtained to make the book a reality (in October, I think), and there, at the head of this post, is the gorgeous Jeffrey Alan Love cover-art under which livery it will appear. I'm seriously delighted by this.

Otherwise things have been chugging along. The SF Awards season is coming to an end, with all the important prizes either awarded or shortlisted, which means I can now say that no novel or short-story I wrote during 2017 has troubled any of the shortlist drawer-uppers of any award. This was what I thought would happen, and although it's of course disappointing to me personally it's a matter of perfect indifference to SF as a whole (that's the third year straight this has been the state of affairs, which tells you something about where my work stands in terms of the genre's collective markers of esteem). I have some Real Town Murders sequel news to share, which I will do shortly, and one or two other things going on. But mostly, so far in 2018, I have been doing other sorts of writing, specifically (a) putting down the markers on a 'Literary Biography' of H G Wells, and (b) slowly building the argument for a scholarly monograph on Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

News for February

I've been busy. You wouldn't know it from this website, I concede; unless you were canny enough to realise that the reason updates have been so sparse lately is precisely because I've been busy. There will be more news soon, with concrete details, on books and other things; but for now I am breaking cover to record in this place that my project of reading the entire run of H G Wells's works (preparatory to me writing a Literary Biography of the man) has finally come to an end. A year, it took me, off and on. And at the other end of this link is the index to the blogposts I wrote recording my progress.

More soon.

Guardian reviews Real-Town

Link. As you can see the review fills a whole, spacious pararaph:

Never a writer to repeat himself, Adam Roberts yet again rings the changes with his 17th novel, The Real-Town Murders (Gollancz, £16.99), a fast-paced murder mystery set in a radically altered near-future Britain. With the majority of the population spending their lives in Shine, an immersive virtual reality, the country is a depopulated wasteland inhabited by exoskeletal exercise machines carrying comatose citizens. When a body is discovered in the boot of a car on an automated production line, private eye Alma is tricked into investigating the murder, soon finding herself mired in shady political shenanigans. As ever, Roberts’s use of the genre to explicate ideas – the allure of virtual reality and the consequent affectless society – is done with grace and economy, and what might have been a grim read is leavened by moments of irreverent black humour.

Interzone 272 (Sep-Oct 2017) Interview: Jo Walton

Not that Jo Walton, though a very insightful and estimable Jo Walton nonetheless. His brief was to ask me a few questions about Real-Town, with a view to filling a page of Interzone. In the end we chatted, back and forth via email, until we had a 10,000 word dialogue. We both, I think, expected the magazine to request we trim this down to a tenth of its size, if you please, but hugely to their credit (I think) they ended up printing the whole thing, over 9 whole pages. Bravo, them!

... and so on. I won't reproduce the whole thing, or you'd have no incentive actually to buy a copy of Interzone 272. And you really should buy a copy: it's an all-round excellent magazine.

Morning Star reviews Real-Town

Click the image to embiggen, should you be so inclined. ‘Fabulously inventive and at times horrifyingly funny and action-packed.’ Can't say fairer than that.