A.R.R.R. Roberts

I have not in the past got on especially well with Adam Roberts’s novels. He’s an enormously clever bloke and has excellent taste in fiction, but I think there’s something in his approach to the genre which rubs me up slightly the wrong way. Except. I really did like The Thing Itself and thought it very good indeed. The narrator is a radio astronomer, wintering in Antarctica with a creepy geek. This is during the 1980s. The geek is secretly experimenting with perception – the idea show more that our senses mediate the world, that there is something there, in reality, an idea based on Kant’s Ding an sich, which our senses edit out… but what if we could actually perceive it… “It” all turns out to be a bit Lovecraftian and eldritch, but the geek’s unsuccessful attempt to kill the narrator, and the brief glimpse the narrator has of unadulterated reality, were enough to fuck him up. And now, decades later, he’s a complete loser (although the geek is in Broadmoor). But then he’s contacted by a secret thinktank – and it’s pretty obvious they’ve built themselves an AI, but the narrator is too dumb to realise this – because they need him to approach the geek… And, of course, everything goes horribly wrong and the narrator ends up on the run, not entirely sure who he’s running from and increasingly convinced the mad geek has developed some sort of superpower. There are also a number of historical sections, which better explain, and illustrate, the book’s central Ding an sich premise. I do have a couple of minor niggles, however. The narrator uses a cane, which he loses while fleeing from hospital… but mysteriously has it back a chapter or two later. And a female character changes name over a couple of pages. But that’s minor, trivial even. I thought this a very good sf novel. show less

In 1946, a group of Soviet SF authors are gathered together by Stalin and told to invent a credible threat from space that would bind together the Soviet people and give them an external threat to struggle against once capitalism had been finally defeated. Then, mysteriously, the project is disbanded and the participants scattered, with very strict instructions not to breathe a word of this to anyone.

But forty years later, one of the authors begins to suspect that the alien threat they show more invented might just be becoming real...

This is a highly entertaining book which for most of its length can't decide whether it's sf or a slightly dark absurdist Russian novel. Parts of it are laugh-out-loud funny; other parts are by turns frightening, chilling or revelatory. In the end, it turns out to be sf, though not in any way we imagined when the novel started.

As someone who reads the Cyrillic alphabet, I get irritated when western designers mis-use that script as if they were Roman letters. Kudos to Gollancz and their designers, Blacksheep, then (in the UK edition) for producing one of the least worst examples of this on the UK trade paperback cover. show less

After the end of WWII, Josef Stalin secretly brought together a group of science fiction writers whom he invited to imagine an alien invasion scenario that could be used to unite the Soviet people against a supposed new enemy. Nothing ever seemed to come of it. So why, forty years later, are weird, inexplicable things happening to one of the writers? Why are things they imagined in their fictional scenario happening? Things like the explosions of an American space vehicle and a Ukrainian show more nuclear reactor? And what's going on with the KGB and the Scientologists and the UFOs that might or might not actually exist?

Yeah, this is a strange, strange novel. Like, however strange you think it is from that description, bump it up a notch or two. It's impossible to know what the hell is going on for most of it, either for the reader or the protagonist, and while things are sort of explained in the end, it's a weird and wild explanation. But it's a fun ride, full of droll humor and a bit of interesting food for thought. There are some individual elements I could take issue with. Like, there's a character who is very clearly autistic, and he and his "syndrome" are played for some absurd laughs. Should I be uncomfortable with this, given that everyone is played for absurd laughs? Probably, yeah, but I find myself as unsure what to make of that as I am of everything else. Still, overall, it was quite engaging and entertaining, even if it was in that "What the heck am I even reading?" kind of a way most of the time, and I'm genuinely impressed by how well it worked for me. show less

It has been suggested good Bruce Willis movies are the ones where he’s bald, and in bad ones he has hair. Obviously the same wouldn’t work for Adam Roberts’s novels, because, well, his hairline may be receding but it doesn’t vary by book. I did think, however, something similar might operate with the titles of his novels - those which start with the word “the” were excellent, those without are merely good. But, according to Wikipedia, of Roberts’ twenty-four novels, only three show more have the definite article as the first word in their title…

True, I liked two of them, including The This; but I’ve not read the third. And, to be honest, I did like some of the ones without an initial “the”. So, not a good theory then. I suppose I was trying to find a reason why I liked The Thing Itself and The This so much more than the other novels I’d read by Roberts. The answer was, of course, there in the books: they are explicitly explorations of the ideas of individual philosophers, Kant and Hegel, respectively. What I know about philosophy and philosophers can be written on a small post-it note, so perhaps it’s the discipline which hewing to the particular philosopher’s works has forced on Roberts - sort of like Oulipo, I guess - which has, to my mind, produced works of science fiction I find I much prefer.

On the other hand…

The title refers to a company which creates a hands-free app for social media. In the future, a war between Hive Mind Theta, the end-result of all those people having the hands-free social media client implanted in their brains, and the rest of humanity takes place in orbit about Venus, which HMΘ are intending to terraform.

The two main narratives are set around a century apart. In the very near future, Rich Rigby, a freelance journalist, interviews a PR person from The This. The company then sets out to recruit him to their network, so intently it draws the attention of, er, HMG. They persuade him to join The This, but he’ll have a computer virus embedded in his brain. This will allow the authorities to spy on the hive mind.

Then there’s Adan Vergara, a none-too-bright New Yorker of a century or so after Rigby, who is cut off by his mother and has to join the military. They’re fighting HMΘ, but Vergara seems to be able to shutdown HMΘ droids on the battlefield simply by uttering a single gnomic phrase. He was told this phrase by someone, or something, who hacked his Phene (a semi-aware sexbot, essentially), which Adan profoundly loves.

As the war ends, Adan is pulled into the far distant future, where he meets the embodiment of Hegelian world spirit, which was threatened by the existence of the hive mind. He is told how he, and Rich Rigby, helped put humanity back on track, so the universe would end with a Prime Mover as intended.

As I read the final section of The This, I was reminded of AE van Vogt’s The Universe Maker, where the hero is pulled into the far distant future to have the plot of the novel explained to him by a giant space brain. The This is, of course, considerably better written, and a “novelisation” of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is hardly the same as Van Vogt’s crackpot science and dream-inspired haphazard plotting.

To be honest, I was more taken with Rigby’s and Vergara’s narratives. The opening section, a piece of experimental prose, was good, but experimental prose is best in small doses. But Rigby and Vergana - it’s superior prose. I do wonder how much of Roberts’s The Black Prince project, the completion of an unfinished novel by Anthony Burgess, rubbed off on The This, because there’s a distinct Burgessian feel to the language. I also suspect one of the earlier sections, which features a string of social media posts as marginalia, was included only so Roberts could include some of his bad Twitter jokes - but perhaps that’s unkind.

The This is the best of Roberts’s novels I’ve read so far (which is around half of them). Recommended. show less