Adam Roberts at Tangled Web UK

Page Updated: 13/07/2007

Page 1

Page 2

Page 3

Adam Roberts - Page 1

21 Jun 07

pbk 01 Jun 07

About the Author

First British Edition Gollancz (2007)

Land of the Headless

‘On Tuesday a genetic materials test confirmed my guilt (but of course this confirmation was only a formality) and on Wednesday I was beheaded. My crime was adultery.’

On the planet Pulse, where society is shaped by a strict adherence to the word of God as laid out in the Bibliqu’ran, Jon Cavala, a poet, is accused of adultery. Found guilty, he must face the punishment laid down in the Good Book: beheading.
Beheaded ,he is fitted with a neck-valve, processor, ordinator and basic sensory equipment and sent out into the world. But because he bears a terrible and very visible stigma, he is forced to join the army and serve in the war against the neighbouring planet. And plan his revenge against the man he believes is really guilty.
Can he survive the savage realities of a high-tech war and make it back home to see justice done? But what really happened with the woman? Can we believe his story? Can he?
Land of the Headless is a searing and supremely timely satire of religious fundamentalism, a novel of love and war, and a study of self-delusion. It is an elegantly written, thought provoking and unique SF novel.
'The king of high-concept' Jon Courtenay Grimwood, The Guardian
‘Roberts belongs in the front rank of hard SF writers’ SFX
‘A purveyor of illusions that underscore the real, a beguiling dispenser of cruel instruction’ sfsite.com
‘Roberts joins my list of essential writers’ Vector

First British Edition Gollancz (2006)

Doctor Whom

E.T. shoots and leaves
The Zero Tolerance Approach to Parodication
No Copies Sold Galaxywide… So Far

The extraterrestrial pointed his oddly-shaped weapon at the Dr. ‘This is the end.’ He said. ‘This is goodbye forever, Dr! No longer shall your kind oppress the Galaxy with your terrible grammatical correctitude-’
‘-ness,’ corrected the Dr. in a small voice. Even though he had his arms up, and a gun stuck into his chest, he couldn’t help it.
‘You die now!’ screeched the infuriated ET.

Join Dr Whom, his reliably pedantic assistant Linnaeus Trout … and Prose Tailor. Don’t worry, not even he knows why he’s (possessive apostrophe or the other sort? Uhhh) in the story. Oh (should there be a comma there do you think? Or perhaps an exclamation mark) that’s right he’s the narrator.
Still there should be plenty of room for all three of them on the adventure what with the TARDY being bigger on the inside than the out. Mind you, have you ever wondered (you haven’t have you?) what that would mean for the smallest room on the TARDY? Yes that’s right, the toilet is the size of an aircraft hangar. Where was I?
Oh yes. Join the Dr., (full stop then a comma - that can’t be right - look there’s a little squiggly green line under it) Linn and Prose as they fight to protect the galaxy from the perils of bad grammar, sloppy punctuation and careless sentence construction. Not to mention, the Cydermen, the remorseless android Garleks and the Celebrity Chefs du Monde.
A.R.R.R. Robert's actually used to be a Doctor you know. But now he's gone all hoity-toity and become a Professor. That's right, being a Doctor wasn't good enough for old A.R.R.R. 250,000 million pounds a year and all the elastic support bandages you can use and Doctor Robert's wanted more. It makes me sick. The National Health Ser ... Doctor of the Arts you say? Ah. I'll shut up.
And I bet he's got those bloody awful leather patches on the elbows of his cord jacket. Or is that just geography teachers? Look it's not easy writing cover copy you know.

Paperback - Gollancz (2006)

First British Edition Gollancz (2006)

Gradisil
Revenge needs space to grow
Gradisil is an epic space opera of family revenge and the birth of a nation.
Not so very long from now, if you are wealthy, space can be yours. Space to grow. New technology has seeded a rebirth of the pioneer spirit. A new breed of adventurer has slipped the bonds of gravity and begun a fresh life in orbit. Free from interference by government, free from the petty concerns of earth.
Who wouldn’t want such freedom? Who wouldn’t want to escape from society’s tangles? From the claws of the corporations? From the stifling love of family?
But tradition, fear and revenge carry a murderous weight. A gravity that is not so easy to escape. The death of Gradisil’s grandfather, floating high in the uplands above earth; was only the beginning. And now the US government is looking up at the new nation above our heads with jealous eyes.
Reviews for Adam Roberts
'Very high concept. Very vividly executed' Stephen Baxter
‘Roberts joins my list of essential authors’ Vector (Critical Journal of the British Science Fiction Association)
‘A pretty superb tale, a poison chalice of delights’ John Clute, New York Review Of Science Fiction
‘Very high concept. Very vividly executed’ Stephen Baxter
‘A purveyor of illusions that underscore the real, a beguiling dispenser of cruel instruction. Heed him. Harsh medicine is not often so entertainingly administered’ SFSITE.COM
‘Adam Roberts has got what it takes’ Peter F. Hamilton

First British Edition Gollancz (2005)

Star Warped

Dum Dum Dum, Duhm D'dum, Duhm D'dum
A long time ago (blah blah) a really quite good SF film
was released. The special effects look pretty shoddy
now but it did have some quite good actors in it.
And Mark Hamill.
A second and third film that were actually the fifth and
sixth films followed and they weren’t quite so good but
they were still quite fun [especially when the teddies got
blasted by the Imperial stormtroopers]. Then, just when
we thought they’d forgotten, the first, second and third
films followed and they were [let’s be honest now] fairly
dreadful though by now the special effects were much better.
A Gollancz parody was inevitable, And here it is.

An epic told in six chapters. An epic of good versus evil.
Of dark versus light. Of hairy co-pilots and short green
gurus. Of bizarre hair styles, brass bras and camp robots.
An epic that starts in the middle. And that’s the original …
The Universe is ill. The Universe is lazy. You know how it is. It’s not as young as it was. It’s expanded a bit. Perhaps it will take up jogging in the evenings when the current series of The X-Wing Factor has ended.
But the Imperial Empire of the Imperium is not happy with the health of its subjects. There must be more exercise, less junk food, not so much salt in the diet. And binge drinking is right out
So a terrible plan is hatched. And in the dark reaches of space [which to be honest is most of it) a terrifying weapon in the War Against Lassitude is constructed. The size of a moon sized moon. A horrifying amalgam of leisure technology and brutish will: the Death Spa.
But a rebellion against the Imp Emp Imp is growing. A rebellion that will take young Luke Seespotrun on an odyssey across the galaxy and to a meeting with the Dark Lord of the Psmyth, Dark Father (no relation).
A3R Roberts is one of the new class of Artificial Rubbish Synthesising Engine droids. Sent back from the future to defeat mankind’s rebellion against the machines by getting its leaders to sit down and read books all day rather than training in small unit tactics and learning how to strip down an AK 47 in the dark. He cannot be reasoned with and he absolutely will not stop. Oops, sorry wrong films.

Paperback - Gollancz (2006)

First British Edition Gollancz (2005)

The Va Dinci Cod

In his own blood, the dying man had written a single sentence in splashy, red letters. It was very much a red letter statement:
The Catholic Church Had Me Murdered
For long seconds Donglan stared at the mysterious message. ‘That, Doctor Donglan,’ said Tash, ‘is why we have called you in at this time. That mysterious message.’
‘It may,’ said Robert, ‘be an anagram.’
‘We wondered about that,’ said Tash. ‘Can you decipher it?’
Donglan smiled. ‘Of course. It is my speciality,’ he said. He tried to add ‘I am an anagram master’, but instead said ‘I amanana manna’ and ‘I am anamanna’ and stopped.

Five utterly baffling mysteries that will change what you believe about the world. And fish. And the wisdom of ever reading another book:
• An eminent, renowned museum curator lies dead in his own gallery, with a three foot cod stuffed down his throat ...
• A brilliant young man, a renowned anagrammatologist, good-looking, gsoh, own flat, good job, non-smoker, very high standards of personal hygiene, single, he’s not gay, and he’s not antisocial, he meets lots of women really, just nobody seems quite right ...
• A beautiful, renowned young French police cryptologist who studied for her cryptology degree at Royal Holloway* - a university without a department in cryptology ...
• A book full of rehashed conspiracy theory cods (Oh! My! God!) wallop becomes a global bestseller.
• Another book that should be called The Eda Vinci Cod gets called The Va Dinci Cod instead. An anagram is it? Err no.
The true reasons for the success of Don Brine’s books are a secret that not even the Knights Templar, the CIA or the Church of the Resplendent Latter Day Apostles Who came Down from Space to Smite the Liberals (Alabama) are privy to.
Less-than-interestingly if you transcribe Don Brine into the Cyrillic alphabet and read it in a mirror and then transcribe it back out of the Cyrillic it reads as a transliteration of the Hebrew for Adam Roberts. If you squint a bit.
Adam Roberts, get this, actually does teach at Royal Holloway. But not cryptology. Perhaps not even English.

*Hilariously, Royal Holloway have asked us to point out that every one is very excited by the Masters degree programmes in cryptology offered by their ‘world leading’ research centre in information Security. Whatever that means.

About The Author
Adam Roberts is a lecturer at the University of London. He has an MA from Aberdeen and a PhD in English and Classics from Cambridge. Adam has been a Lecturer of English at Royal Holloway, University of London since 1990. His areas of specialisation are:
1) Nineteenth Century. He is Deputy Director of RHUL’s MA in Victorian Media and Culture.
2) Postmodernism. Deputy Director of the RHUL MA in Postmodernism, Literature and Contemporary Culture and
3) Science Fiction.
He is also the Deputy Dean of Arts.
Adam has edited and published a number of academic books: Robert Browning (Twayne 1996) (ed.); Robert Browning (OUP: The Oxford Authors 1998); Romantic and Victorian Long Poems: a Guide (Ashgate 1999) (ed.); Tennyson (OUP: The Oxford Authors 2000) (assoc. ed); The Oxford Readers Guide to Dickens (OUP 1999); Fredric Jameson (Routledge: Routledge Critical Thinkers, September 2000); Science Fiction (Routledge New Critical Idiom 2000).
Adam’s previous SF novels include Salt (for which he received an Arthur C. Clarke award nomination), he followed that up with On and last year published Stone. Polystom is Adam’s Roberts’ fourth novel.
He currently lives in Staines with his wife and daughter.

Thousands of New and used Books at your Fingertips...
Support Tangled Web - Buy Your Books Online

Bibliography
N.B. dates and publishers in dark red indicate British First Editions. Dates and publishers in black indicate recent reprints.

Land of the Headless (Gollancz, 2007) Jun 07

Doctor Whom (Gollancz, 2006) Gollancz Pbk Jun 07

Gradisil (Gollancz, 2006) Gollancz Pbk Nov 06

Star Warped (Gollancz, 2005)

The Va Dinci Cod (Gollancz, 2005) Gollancz Pbk May 06

Polystom (Gollancz, 2004) Gollancz Pbk Jul 04

The Sellamillion (Gollancz, 2004) Gollancz Pbk Sep 05

The McAtrix Derided ( 2004) Gollancz Pbk May 05

Stone (Gollancz, 2002) Gollancz Pbk Mar 03

ON (Gollancz, 2001) Gollancz Pbk Jun 02

SALT (Gollancz, 2000) Gollancz Pbk Jul 01