I have started a substack, Substack-ships on Fire . You could subscribe, if you like! I have spread myself across a large number of blogs over the years, and it has it has not been the most efficient use of my time and energies. I should consolidate. To that end I'm going to take some of my other blogs private. In the case of blogs that have run their course anyway, such as my H G Wells blog , my…
some hutch depends upon a red grand torino striped with white zigzag beside the dave starsky
In Lake of Darkness , what goes wrong is slightly mysterious. It may be a threat from an Ancient Evil which meddling scientists have unleashed from its prison (cue a great deal of speculation about who or what would be capable of constructing this prison and the paradoxes it builds into the universe). Or it may be that the evil has been loose and ac time for aeons. Or it may be that both things…
I was really quite ill when we recorded this conversation , as you can manifestly tell if you watch it. Still, we chatted.
Click to embiggen and enlegify.
Available now from all good bookshops (including Waterstones ) and Amazon UK . There is some issue with Amazon US, it seems: you can buy the audiobook for dollars [ update : as per the comment below, it seems you can't, actually] but not the actual book. I'm not sure why, and will look into it. Is it any good? I'm hardly the person to say yes, or no, and you doubtless have better things on which…
I have a new novel coming out in July ( amazon page here ): a utopian novel mashed-up with some space-opera Lovecraftian/Dennis Wheatley horror. My teenage son, when I explained the premise, suggested I call it Space Satan!!! , with that many exclamation marks, and this may have been a better title than the King Lear reference with which I have actually gone. But here we are. And isn't the…
Coming soon, from NeoText .
Now published! On Amazon: £3.99 on Kindle, Audiobook £2.99 and in a most handsomely-produced paperback edition, a mere £9.19 (also available direct from the publisher ). Get em while they're hot, as hot as the hellfire to which the wicked soul of Sir Martin Malprelate has, surely, been consigned, following his death, smashed to atoms by a huge spectral ghost-locomotive passing through the streets…
Friends and colleagues. From left to right: Matt Thorne (edge of frame), Redell Olsen , Professor Finn Fordham , Ben Markovits and yours truly.
Click to embiggen. Click here to pre-order .
I'm delighted to say that The This has been shortlisted for the 2023 BSFA Award for best novel. It's a great honour, especially considering the high calibre of the other shortlisted titles. The winner will be announced at this year’s Eastercon, Conversation , (at the Birmingham Metropole, 7th–10th April 2023) and BSFA members can vote here . I'll be at the ceremony: maybe see you there. --- […
This has been in the offing for a while, but now, it seems, it's out of the offing, and into the, er, inning. So: it's a very-near near-future-set thriller, written in Donald E Westlake/Richard Stark mode, about a man who steals spaceships for a living. Publisher: NeoText . Presently it's e-book only (not sure what may come, format-wise, in the future). On the upside, at the moment it's only 99c…
The paperback edition of The This is set for release in a few days (10th November in fact) ( 10th Nov Update : 10th November is today! Now available to buy !) . To mark that, here's the review the latest edition of SFX carries about the book: click to embiggen and clarify the image. 5 stars! Pick of the paperbacks! A little frustrating at the start! Will change your entire worldview if you make it…
I looked-up this 1850 map (for something Victorian-set I'm presently writing, in order to check the exact path of the Great Western Railway ) and was struck by the compass of this small section of it. So: in 1965 I was born, in Mayday Hospital, now called Croydon Hospital : in the bottom right hand portion of this image. I grew up in Peckham, and then Sydenham. I presently live, as it happens,…
Coming up, this Thursday: ‘The Mythology of the Future’—a panel with myself, Beth Singler, Yen Ooi and Jennifer Woodward, part of the Science Fiction Squared Symposium, exploring the future of science fiction [ Tickets still available, I think: Thu 29 Sep 2022,Island Social, Globe House, 34 Botanic Square, E14 0LU ]. The brief for our panel is: ‘Mythology seeks to explain the unknown past; science…
link Those excellent readers, Bill and Joel, are joined by ‘one of the best essayists in America’ (the TLS's words, not mine; though I agree with them) Phil Christman, to talk about my The This , which is about hive minds, social media, Coleridge and, most importantly, GWF Hegel . It is, I can be straight with you, amazing to me. Listen and see, or hear, for yourself. I mean, amazing. Amazing!…
Prashanth Gopalan finds The This to be ‘ a wildly imaginative novel, a thought experiment on morality and social organization, and a meditation on time and consciousness .’ With its interesting theories about the roots of human social behaviour, organization, and culture, and its intense explorations of life within a hivemind, The This explores the nature of being and belonging, and what people…
I was asked yesterday about my blogs, and it occurred to me that I don't anywhere have them itemised or indexed. So here goes. One . This blog, Morphosis , is now my stand-in author website. I used to run a site called adamroberts.com to that end, but it cost a surprisingly large amount of money and nobody ever visited it so I stopped my subscription and instead repurposed this Blogger platform as…
The most recent issue of the excellent ParSec magazine (you can, and should, subscribe over at the NewCon website ) includes a review of The This by the estimable Donna Scott. A snippet therefrom: One of the things you may already have read about Adam Roberts’ latest science-fiction novel is that it is “Hegelian” – absolutely steeped in clever philosophical arguments after the school of Georg…
Pleased with that! Additional reaction here .
First, here's a link to the long and (I think) interesting Phil Christman conducted with me for his substack . Phil is a good guy, and a really good writer, although, whilst I can't contradict his opening sentence here, I'm not sure it's the entire veritude. But you should definitely read the interview! Second, in The This news: there have been some reviews, for instance here at SF Crowsnest , and…
Amazed and delighted that Purgatory Mount has made the 2022 BSFA Best Novel shortlist , especially considering how very strong the list is as a whole: A Desolation Called Peac e by Arkady Martine, Tor Blackthorn Winter by Liz Williams, NewCon Press Purgatory Mount by Adam Roberts, Gollancz Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky, Tor Skyward Inn by Aliya Whiteley, Solaris Green Man’s Challenge by…
Some reactions to The This : Brian Cregg admires, but does not love, the novel . A more expansive (though of course not necessarily more accurate) response to the novel from Alan Jacobs, here . Goodreads is currently running at 4.5 out of 5 , Buzzmag seems to like the book (or have I misunderstood?) and there are various other online responses, amazon reviews and so on. And here is the estimable…
Today, The This reviewed in the Guardian . It's the second of my novels Lisa Tuttle has reviewed, and the first she has liked, so that's good. Imagine a social media app implanted in the roof of the mouth for more immersive connectivity. This one small step turns out to be a giant leap in human evolution, a sort of telepathy that brings everyone together as parts of one vast, gestalt…