Review of Swiftly by Adam Roberts

Swiftly by Adam Roberts


My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Continuing the world of Gulliver’s Travels into the Victorian era seems like such a natural idea I’m surprised no one has done it before. Roberts neatly fits Gulliver’s new world into the narrative of empire, another land to be conquered and used alongside so many others. The Lilliputians are slave artisans, building impossibly tiny Steampunk devices with the precision machines at that time could only dream of. The Brobdingnagian are nearly exterminated by the Royal Navy, and ally with the French.

Adam Roberts gets a lot of credit in my book for not stopping there. Instead he takes Swift’s premise of big and little and pushes it out in both directions, below the naked eye and out into space. The result is a fascinating idea, even if I don’t think it quite succeeded as a novel.

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There are a lot of great scenes in the book: the plague coming to Scarborough and the fall of London come to mind. However I think Roberts goes down a bit of a philosophical rabbit hole at the end with the Battle of York. The ideas overwhelm the narrative, and after a while I became disconnected from the characters. I admit there was also a bit more fecalphilia than I am usually up for in a book.
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Swiftly is daring, creative, but in dire need of a firmer narrative hand.





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