Adam Roberts: Critical Essays

Description

Each chapter in this collection explores the challenge posed to science fiction, literary fiction and contemporary ideas through Roberts's novels. His use of the science fiction toolkit combined with his sharp and sometimes lyrical prose blurs the distinction that some would wish to maintain between science fiction and mainstream literature. Contents Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations On Being the Object of Critical Scrutiny Adam Roberts New Model Writer Christos Callow Jr. and Anna McFarlane Part I: Alienating Characters The Disassociated Hero Farah Mendlesohn Pax Per Tyrannis: Religious and Political Extremism Exposed via Menippean Satire in the Novels of Adam Roberts Michelle Yost New Model Readers: Changing Critical and Popular Receptions of the Science Fiction of Adam Roberts Niall Harrison Part II: Political Interventions Breaking the Cycle of the Golden Age: Jack Glass and Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy Anna McFarlane On the Topic of Plenty: Sunshine and Ice-Cream Mountains in By Light Alone Catherine Parry Nation-State 2.0: Visions of Europe in Adam Roberts's New Model Army Thomas Wellmann Part III: Ludic Authorship New Model Authors? Authority, Authordom, Anarchism and the Atomized Text in a Networked World Paul Graham Raven Splinter Swiftly: The Hermeneuting Parallax of Adam Roberts's Generic Auteurship Andrew M. Butler Part IV: Intertextual Networks Beyond Brobdingnagians and Bolsheviks: Extra-Textual Readings of Swiftly and Yellow Blue Tibia Glyn Morgan Rule of Law: Reiterating Genre in Jack Glass Paul March-Russell Notes on Contributors Index Reviews It's an excellent idea to gather a book of essays about the work of Adam Roberts. His novels are so various and brilliant that it's a pleasure to discuss them in depth, as it is with the work of any gifted artist following a singular path. This volume clarifies parts of Roberts' project while deepening mysteries elsewhere in it just what one wants from literary criticism. -- Kim Stanley Robinson Adam Roberts has long been regarded as one of contemporary science fiction's most innovative, and overlooked, writers. Adam Roberts: Critical Essays makes an excellent intervention in addressing this critical lacuna, yielding productive insights into the startling inventiveness of his texts, their rich intertextuality, ludic playfulness, and, more recently, political response to a post-Occupy world. Roberts's novels and parodies themselves have much to teach us about the science fiction tradition, and these essays rightfully position his work as among the best of twenty-first-century writing in the speculative mode. --Dr Caroline Edwards, Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature, Birkbeck, University of London Adam Roberts is at once the cleverest and wittiest of contemporary science fiction writers. This dazzling collection of essays shows how cleverness is his topic as well as his technique, and how his wit both mocks and accentuates the prodigious intelligence that marks every page of his work. I haven't read a more perceptive or entertaining tribute to a living author. --Dr Robert Maslen, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, University of Glasgow When the history of 21st-century science fiction is written, Adam Roberts will be remembered as this era's H. G. Wells. --Damien Walter, Writer, Columnist for The Guardian, Writing teacher.