By Light Reviewed

I've been neglecting this website: apologies. I'll make things a little busier here, starting off with some reviews of By Light Alone. Here's Stuart Kelly, at the Scotsman:

TWO years ago, Kim Stanley Robinson declared that Adam Roberts ought to have won that year's Man Booker Prize. Roberts, like writers as diverse as China Mieville, Will Self, Ken MacLeod and David Wingrove, exists in that weird hinterland between literary and genre fiction. By Light Alone is both more interesting in terms of its ideas and more memorable in terms of the actual, sentence-by-sentence writing on the page than much of what passes as serious fiction. I once, in a rather exasperated moment, said that I yearned for a literature without dinner parties. By Light Alone, with nauseous and visceral brilliance, manages to be a great contemporary novel that includes even them. ... Roberts is asking important questions about the nature of need, the metaphysics of hunger and how revolutions come about, both technologically and politically. Maybe it's time for a new prize: not for "literary fiction" or "good reads" but for novels that actually challenge.

To have pleased a critic as intelligent and perceptive as Kelly is very gratifying indeed. Here's the equally intelligent Guy Haley at SFX:

Is it possible for a writer to follow the precepts of Moore's Law, doubling their capacity for excellence with every book? Probably not, but Adam Roberts is giving it a spirited try ... Roberts cunningly pricks out the ridiculous shape of our society with wickedly sharp satire. Inequality and self-obsession are his targets, and yet he manages to hit them while keeping his characters entirely human and sympathetic. No-one does SF parables quite like Roberts, and as usual it's all spun from the most amazing prose. Taken in isolation, his sentences here tend to the overly candied, but the effect of them en masse is hypnotically poetic. It's brilliantly effective, and affecting. Roberts's SF novels are all worthy of praise, but there's a certain majesty to By Light Alone – better rush out now and buy it, before the mainstream literary establishment sweeps Roberts under its wing and tells us he's not aloud to play out with the nerds anymore. It's hard for us sometimes to credit some of the claims made by PR, but when Gollancz calls Roberts one of the most important writers of his generation, it's something of an understatement: this man puts art at the heart of our genre.

Here's the estimable David Barnett, in the Independent on Sunday:

If By Light Alone were written by David Mitchell or Margaret Atwood, for example, it would doubtless be said to "transcend its science fiction" roots, as all literary fiction which borrows SF trappings must. But By Light Alone is unashamedly SF, and would that half the supposed "literary" novels on the shelves today were as well written, thoughtful and intelligent as this.

Finally here's Gwyneth Jones, in the Guardian. A rather negative review, I think (it's a little hard to say) -- though it's an honour to be reviewed by a writer of her stature:

Every element in the story of Leah's disappearence and return will be equally, annoyingly shorn of context, all details blurred and dim – swamped in the mush of Marie's utter indifference, and George's helpless failure to connect. Clearly, one of the targets of Roberts's satire is a fat-headed culture of ignorance. Likewise, there's a righteous purpose, as well as some malicious glee, in the obesity motif. The titanic blimps who stomp through these serious pages, in a pastiche of gross-out reality TV – Very Fat People Having Sex; Very Fat People Sicking Up Their Dinners – are there to teach us a lesson. By making visible the invisible blubber that swaddles our own beautiful people – the sickening cushion of wealth that smothers empathy – Roberts strips the super-rich of glamour and lampoons everyperson's complicity in the toxic religion of greed. If some readers are offended or sceptical of his motives, that's a risk he seems happy to take. At the Ararat resort there is an attraction called the Ice-Cream Mountain, a Brobdingnagian treat obliquely recalling the mountainous diamond in F Scott Fitzgerald's story, "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz". Fitzgerald's influence is cited in the publicity for By Light Alone, and invoked by the novel's handsome cover; and justly so. But Roberts's updating of romantic jazz age pessimism is ironic. The wondrous gem has become an infantile heap of goo. The rich just aren't different enough, these days. Extreme wealth isn't a tragic, interesting disease, it's a planet-wrecking blight. It's not pretty, and it's not romantic.