REVIEW-ESSAY
Stephen R. Dougherty
Adam Roberts, Reader’s Writer
Christos Callow Jr. and Anna McFarlane, eds. Adam Roberts: Critical Essays.
Canterbury: Gylphi, 2016. 237 pp. £17.99 pbk.
Adam Roberts became a writer because he loves reading, and in fact he explains in his preface to this illuminating essay collection that writing is like reading, “but more so” (3). It is likely that many sf writers are voracious readers, and certainly most sf writers (like the rest of them) learn their craft in part through thoughtful and engaged reading habits. Yet as this essay collection convincingly attests, perhaps no sf writer living today is as creatively engaged with and as knowledgeable about sf literary history as is Roberts. Does this mean he is an out-of-touch-with-reality sci-fi nerd? Not exactly. As our critics argue with equal conviction, and as avid readers of Roberts’s fiction well know (speaking for myself, anyway), his novels are unmistakably, and enigmatically, “political.” If that sounds like serious business, then these collected essays will also suggest that Roberts’s work involves a lot of play. As a “work” of criticism, this admirable book finds itself exposed to its own vital, and unsettling, powers of play.
Adam Roberts: Critical Essays is divided into four parts, preceded by remarks by Roberts and by a comprehensive introduction to the essay collection, “New Model Writer,” by editors Christos Callow Jr. and Anna McFarlane. Part I is titled “Alienating Characters,” and the lead essay by Farah Mendlesohn is “The Disassociated Hero,” a title that gestures toward sf’s typical, or stereotypical, de-emphasis of characterization. (There is fine writing, and then there is sf.) Character is a “problem” in sf, as Mendlesohn argues, because there is no generically built-in expectation for the reader to identify in a strong sense with sf protagonists. Whereas the “‘identification with’” (28) position has predominated in mainstream literature since the late nineteenth century, Mendlesohn suggests that sf “has continued to make use of the more distant position in which the protagonist explores on our behalf the physical and moral landscape of the situation” (27). Roberts exploits this alienating feature of sf for the sake of achieving some pretty chilling effects. Mendlesohn observes that Roberts’s protagonists tend to be sociopaths; the conclusion to be drawn about the oeuvre is that it is critical of a sociopathy that lurks at the heart of science fiction itself.
In “Pax Per Tyrannis: Religious and Political Extremism via Menippean Satire in the Novels of Adam Roberts,” Michelle Yost reads Roberts’s work as satire aimed at “non-democratic institutions of religion, government, and the military ...” (43). She selects three novels for analysis: Salt (2000), The Snow (2004), and Land of the Headless (2007), whose central characters are all “wise” men and women looking for truth in worlds twisted by extremist ideology. Whereas Yost quite sensibly reads Roberts primarily as a satirist, the value of Niall Harrison’s “New Model Readers: Critical and Popular Reception of the SF of Adam Roberts” is in its attention to the sheer multifariousness and idiosyncrasy of Roberts’s fiction. It has been called high concept, literary, comedic, clownish, satiric, and other less kind or conventional things. But like a Beatles album, each Roberts novel possesses a very distinct personality that is more often than not a multiple personality. The Snow starts as apocalyptic fiction and finishes as a classic invasion narrative. New Model Army (2010) opens as military sf and ends with a send-up of the singularity. Such thematic inconsistencies are characteristic of Roberts’s “experimental” oeuvre. Then again, his breakthrough novel, Yellow Blue Tibia (2009), is formally one his most conventional narratives. “[G]rand unified theories of Adam Roberts,” Harrison concludes, “are doomed to fail” (75).
Whereas Harrison warns us away from sweeping interpretations of the oeuvre, the authors in Part II of the essay collection, “Political Interventions,” address the rich interpretive possibilities of stand-alone readings. Taken together, the three essays in this section productively complement one another, and highlight the attunement of Roberts’s off-kilter fictions to current social and political circumstances. The first essay is Anna McFarlane’s “Breaking the Cycle of the Golden Age: Jack Glass and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy.” In opposition to Asimovian cyclical history, McFarlane writes, “Roberts shows history and time taking place in a quantum and chaotic paradigm” (84). The interstellar crime narrative of Jack Glass (2012) opens up space for thinking about epochal shifts in sf literary history, and for considering the significance of those changes for contemporary political culture. Catherine Parry’s “On the Topic of Plenty: Sunshine and Ice-Cream Mountains in By Light Alone” tackles one of Roberts’ most off-putting novels. Set in a near future world beset by catastrophic rising sea levels and population explosion, By Light Alone (2011) features the novum of the “Sunlight Bug,” which allows Earth’s billions of poor people to feed off sunlight. Through photosynthesis, the teeming masses are kept alive, but just barely, despite their removal from the food chain. Meanwhile, wealthy and ridiculously overfed Westerners use food consumption to set themselves apart, eating themselves into oblivion while revolution stirs. If the novel is “unlikeable and unsettling” (106), as Parry suggests, her critical response to its “deliberate fucked-upness” (121) is one of the high points of the book. Her discussion of the novel’s complicated relation to utopian traditions is articulate and elegant. Thomas Wellman rounds out Part II with his “Nation-State 2.0: Visions of Europe in Adam Roberts’s New Model Army.” Wellman reads Roberts’s near-future military sf New Model Army (2010) as an allegory of the nation-state in the digital age. Here too, the novel’s fraught relation with utopianism is highlighted. Our gun-toting, keyboard-tapping hero Block, proud foot-soldier of the guerilla fighting unit Pantegral—one of many such hyper-connected and frighteningly inchoate combat forces (or NMAs) which have sprung up around the world, vying for supremacy with the old and slow-witted statist armies—invokes the utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch. My only complaint about this enlightening reading of New Model Army is that Wellman seems rather blasé about the “giant” awakened at novel’s end. This gibbering, thrashing, gleeful, and immensely lethal NMA (Giant with a big G), phantasmic and unholy spawn of the singularity, is the ultimate embodiment of what is in my mind, to steal Parry’s useful phrase, the “fucked-upness” of Roberts’s narrative approach generally speaking. I mean that in a good way. The Giant hits you like a bolt out of the blue and makes you feel uncertain about just what it is you have been reading, and what it means. He gives the gentle reader a good thwacking.
Part III of the book is titled “Ludic Authorship,” and consists of two essays, by Paul Graham Raven and Andrew M. Butler respectively, that constitute a kind of tag-team approach to Roberts criticism. Their distinction lies in a flaunting of critical convention, in their disruption of the border between critique and the object of critique, and in their own self-involvement. Due in part to their formal peculiarities, which in some ways (though not in all ways) are very admirable, and which in some ways (though not in all ways) enhance their power to illuminate the work of Adam Roberts, I want to discuss these “playful” essays at greater length. First is Raven’s “New Model Authors? Authority, Authordom, Anarchism and the Atomized Text in a Networked World,” a title which hints at the strange trip ahead. Raven’s contribution is a Borgesian narrative about the search for a mysterious work of criticism on Roberts’s New Model Army. Raven finds this “experimental” writing on the internet, before it disappears without a trace. Prior to its disappearance, however, he stores it on a clipping service. Having alerted the editors of Adam Roberts: Critical Essays as to its potential value, he promises to share the text, so that it might find its place in the volume. Certain scruples about the mystery text’s authorship and provenance, however, make him change his mind. Raven has a falling out with the editors after he informs them that he will not turn over the text. In the end they all agree he will submit notes on the text, his own commentary on the missing work, authored, as it turns out, by one “Graeme P. Crowe.”
Raven’s essay, like Butler’s, examines the “reappropriative logics” (155) of postmodern, or maybe post-postmodern, culture as enabled and abetted by media-technological developments and reconceptualizations of authorship. Both essays offer playful ruminations on contemporary deterritorializations of the mediascape; and they are both performances incorporating techniques of remix, parody, and plagiarism. Raven’s impassioned writing features discussion of his, or Crowe’s, cut-up and remix heroes: Gysin, Burroughs, Jeff Noon, Guy Debord, Asger Jorn, a list to which he would also add the name of sf remix meister Adam Roberts. According to Raven/Crowe, Roberts also deconstructs authordom in the manner of their beloved Borges. Still, the significance of Roberts’s own handful of Borgesian book reviews, offered by Raven/Crow as evidence in support of their argument for his authorial deconstructionism, pales in comparison to the novels’ significance, so deeply inspired as they are by the sf back-catalog. For Raven, Roberts, just like Crowe and his interlocutors, occupies a transgressive “no-man’s land between authordom and plagiarism” (157), and Roberts is anointed as part of the in-crowd for his sins. Raven’s admiration for Roberts is rivalled, however, by his infatuation with Crowe. For a while, Roberts is simply crowded out by the Raven/Crowe love-fest. Raven’s tussle with Crowe for authority over his, or their, own text represents, and dramatically reflects on, the critique of Roberts, who himself is always involved in fraught love-fests with his sf predecessors.
What Raven observes about the imaginary Crowe sometimes muddles the message on the real Roberts. Then again, Raven is not writing a conventional critical essay in which the rules of critical engagement are taken for granted, or where the question of what we mean by authorship is assumed. In a sense, the critical interference between Roberts and Crowe is part of Raven’s game, and it is precisely the reality of Roberts as an author or auteur that is put in question. Just as Raven’s authority is undermined by Crowe—but neither would it exist without it—so too is Roberts’s authority, his very authorship, both established and subverted through his intensely identificatory techniques of pastiche, parody, homage, and metafictionality, as practiced upon those sf writer-heroes he reads so voraciously.
The “instability of authordom” (Raven 158) is what Butler’s essay is about too. In “Splinter Swiftly: The Hermeneuting Parallax of Adam Roberts’s Generic Auteurship,” Butler links the death of the author to the birth of the critic. He dubs the new critics who shall seize the day after the hoary auteur is dethroned the “new genre army” (181). The name invokes Pantagruel, and the Giant, and the whole impious host of Roberts’s new model armies marching under the banner of revolution. Just as the NMAs would level governments, so shall the new genre armies that Butler christens level the authoritarian hierarchies among writers, critics, and readers/fans, where the “genius” writer is the king and the rest are peasants. The best way to finish off the royal writers would be to stop writing about them. (Simply reading writers has never been enough to sustain their scandalous existence.) But then where would the critics be? As both Raven’s and Butler’s essays attest, the serious task at hand is playfully to renew critique by casting a very suspicious eye on the distinction between writer and critic/reader and robbing the writers of their treasure, because it is not theirs anyway, just as the critic does not possess exclusive treasure. Yes, it is “a struggle for power between head and body, between father and children, hierarchy and network” (181), but even that bold rhetorical gesture is part of the game. Butler admits that his essay on Roberts is just “another decapitation and regicide, another act of blasphemy and patricide” (181) that deliberately cheapens the value of the act. He also knows that he would not be writing the essay if Roberts were not somehow more,or less, deserving of the blasphemy and patricide than other authors, which is to say, a writer worth writing about, a writer of distinction.
Two things set Roberts apart. The first is that Roberts is a writer and a critic. Butler inventories his impressive scholarly output: the Routledge New Critical Idiom Science Fiction (2000), the Palgrave History of Science Fiction (2006), the co-edited Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (2009) and Fifty Key Figures in Science Fiction (2010); the book reviews and articles, blog posts, etc. The new genre army must recognize Roberts as one of their own. He is one of them, or us; he is a prophet of post-authoritarianism, a writer for whom it is all about the democratic act of reading, and for whom no reading experience is complete without writing about it. The second thing that sets Roberts apart is related to the first: the very generic-ness of his writing, and even of his name. With a name like Adam Roberts you just have to belong in the new genre army. Butler’s amusing schtick is that he turns up Adam Roberts all over the place, even more than he is already all over the place: Adam Roberts as an International Relations Professor and author of Nations in Arms (1976) and Civil Resistance in the East European and Soviet Revolutions (1991); Adam Roberts as a middling footballer in the English league, as a photographer of the American West, as a motorcycle racer, as author of the sf series Horseclans—actually, that was Robert Adams, but close enough. The common name fits a writer whose oeuvre is so intimately defined by genre, so steeped in sf literary history that the border between his reading it and writing it is a much-discussed topic. Yet for Butler there is no mistaking that Roberts reads/writes sf in a most original and provocative way and so reveals the amazing fertility of genre, the immense potentiality of the generic.
The fourth and final section of Adam Roberts: Critical Essays is titled “Intertextual Networks.” The two essays here follow through on the keen interest in Roberts’s relation to genre, though one of them is better behaved than the other. In “Beyond Brobdingnagians and Bolsheviks: Extra-Textual Readings of Swiftly and Yellow Blue Tibia,” Glyn Morgan examines the connective strategies that help to make up Roberts’s allusive style. His analysis of Swiftly (2008) zeroes in on its intertextual relations to Gulliver’s Travels, with special and rather prolonged attention paid to the shared scatological motif. Morgan’s discussion of the alternate-history content of Swiftly is more compelling. Here we discover that the earliest mass-market writers of alternate history were French, and that they were obsessed with the figure of Napoleon Bonaparte. Thus Roberts’s passing reference in Swiftly to a Bonaparte who dies young functions both as a discrete element of alternate history and as a hat-tip to the history of alternate history. The best part of the essay is Morgan’s discussion of metatextuality, paratextuality, and secret history in Yellow Blue Tibia. Morgan helps to build the case that this is indeed Roberts’s “Philip K. Dick novel.”
Paul March-Russell rounds out the collection with “Rule of Law: Reiterating Genre in Jack Glass.” The brilliance of this essay lies in its theoretical acuity and its subversiveness, an effect enhanced by its location. March-Russell’s final word is that we should think very carefully about the legitimacy of the most fundamental assumptions behind Adam Roberts: Critical Essays—that Roberts is an sf writer, and that there is a genre of fiction readily identifiable as sf. March-Russell reads Jack Glass as if it were a nasty virus injected into the strong, healthy body of Roberts’s meta-sf oeuvre. The novel itself is an experiment in writing sf as detective fiction. This non-sf sf novel “contribut[es] to the fuzziness of genre boundaries” (213); it makes us wonder whether “genre markers really lie in the fuzzy gaze of the beholder … ” (226; ellipses in original). These final words of the essay, and of the book, are meant to be taken seriously. Yet those ellipses in the question signal a space for second guessing. After quoting Derrida regarding genre’s “principle of contamination,” its “law of impurity” (223), March-Russell insists that “to read Roberts’s novel exclusively as a deconstructive exercise in the categorization of genres would be too neat” (225). After all, Jack Glass won the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) award, firmly establishing Roberts as a major sf writer.
Readers and writers alike will find much to appreciate in Adam Roberts: Critical Essays. It is a serious, playful, and very handsome volume, featuring an arresting cover image by Evangelos Callow.
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