Roberts’s new book, Adam Robots, is clear proof that he practises as a storyteller what he preaches as a critic. Another of his passions is comedy, which he argues operates in much the same way as transcendental sf the efficacy of a punchline can often be measured by how strange or surprising a departure it is from its setup. There are traces here of the Romantic concept of the sublime, and it is therefore apt that Roberts teaches nineteenth-century literature when he isn’t writing sf. For Roberts, the finest sf takes its readers on a conceptual flight away from mundane and literal-minded ways of regarding reality and into spectacularly metaphorical representations of it. He delivered an illuminating – and exceedingly funny – keynote speech outlining his theory of science fiction, which he encapsulated in this one idiom: “the knight’s move”. Reviewed by Tom Sykes, Lecturer at the University of Portsmouthīefore I had read any of Adam Roberts’s books, I met him in person at the 2011 Current Research in Speculative Fiction conference.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |