Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
|
Loading... Sibilant Fricativeby Adam Roberts
   None No current Talk conversations about this book. 1   psutto | Oct 7, 2014 |  no reviews | add a review
Awards
"Adam Roberts makes everything wonderful. If he wrote non-fiction about drying paint, I would still be the first in line to read it." - Jared Shurin, Pornokitsch. An award winning author in his own right, Adam Roberts makes no concessions when appraising the work of others. His reviews are honest, forthright, and never timid. In Sibilant Fricative Adam considers a broad spectrum of speculative fiction, from fantasy to science fiction, from literature to films. The book opens with insightful consideration of Philip K Dick's oeuvre followed by Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, and closes with a volume-by-volume analysis of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time opus. Along the way we stop off for a review by text among other amusements - one thing the author never loses sight of is the need to entertain. "Titan is one of the blandest pieces of fiction I have come across in four decades of reading novels. If the Campbell shortlist is a high-class curry restaurant of delicious, spicy and stimulating food, then Titan is a single slice of white bread and margarine on a white plate under the neon light of a truck drivers' caf ." on Titan by Ben Bova "Let me see if I can boil down Crossroads of Twilight's 700-pages for you. Drivel. There you go." on Crossroads of Twilight by Robert Jordan No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers  
 Google Books — Loading...GenresRatingAverage: (3.75)
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Wikipedia in English
2
How could a book reviewer resist this collection? Adam Roberts, the author of e.g. Yellow blue tibia (which I reviewed previously) and By light alone also writes reviews, and pulls no punches. In this collection of reviews and essays of SF (Sibilant & Fricative respectively) he casts his eye over a variety of books and films. I confess to reading the reviews completely out of order, going through the ones of books and films I had already seen and some I had reviewed myself. This was to get a “baseline” for the books and films I’ve not yet got to so that I know what Roberts likes and doesn’t and where he agrees and disagrees with me so that I can see what I need to add to the TBR & TBW piles.
He reviews PKD, Ballard, Pynchon, Mieville, Bova and many others in the SF section, as well as Star Trek & District 9 films and Tolkein, Le Guin, Rothfuss and notably all of the Wheel of Time in the Fantasy section. He reviews with great insight, sly humour and occasionally in the style of the book he is reviewing. The vast majority of the reviews are very entertaining and some are thought provoking, the best are both. For example Roberts sets himself the task to review The Wheel of Time which starts better than he expected but then rapidly becomes a massive chore. Along the way we get a class on how to write well, and why Jordan doesn’t and thoughts about epic fantasy, fandom and a brief meta discussion about reviews. This, in addition to the essay on the “Two Hobbits” is worth the entry ticket alone, and there is so much more entertainment within.
I started keeping note of some of the more out-leap-y examples of WoT-style … But after 120-pages of this I exhausted the patience necessary to interrupt my reading with jotting examples down in my notebook. I wanted to get through the damn thing as soon as possible. That’s not to say that the writing gets any better, for it does not
If you like reading reviews – and you must do if you’re reading this one right? Then I highly recommend this collection to you.
Overall –Erudite, entertaining, intelligent collection of essays and reviews. (