Adam Roberts, Author at ��è��Ƶ

Read an extract from Adam Roberts’s far future-set Lake of Darkness

Adam Roberts — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 08:45:31 +0000

Lake of Darkness is the ��è��Ƶ Book Club’s July pick

You were born, in all likelihood, towards the end of the 20^th– or towards the beginning of the 21^st-centuries. Yes? I have no desire to condescend to you. Many of the features of life today will be readily comprehensible to you, if you can only — as surely you can — extrapolate from your past into our present with a little common sense.

Take the ship. There are lots of imaginary startships in your popular culture, but many of these are only vaguely thought-through: naval ships, or land-based buildings, foolishly projected into deep space. Corridors? Why would we want corridors in a startship? Rigid external superstructures and frame, containing decks and floor — very fragile, under the kinds of shearing forces and pressures of spaceflight. But you already knew this, if you thought about it for a moment. The Sβ Oubliette did not look like a skyscraper lying on its side, or a pyramidically-stacked aircraft carrier. It looked, if you prefer an aquatic analogy, like one of those semi lucent glittering blobs that pulse through the depths of the ocean.

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Some of a startship is its drive and power-systems: propulsion, guidance and AI. But most of it — nine-tenths, as I mentioned above — is a hospital. Human animals are not built for living in space, and any enterprise that puts human beings in space for long stretches of time must spend most of its time attending to the health of those humans. This is not — or, let’s say, it is rarely — a matter of broken bone, or infectious disease, as with older mundane hospitals. It is a congeries of related problems, chief amongst them radiation poisoning and bone-health from calcium loss, with modal health, mental-emotional well-being and temporal dysphasia coming close behind. Deep space is suffused with high levels of various rays and fields that degrade the human body on a cellular level: burns, mutations, cancers, decadences. Much of a deep space mission is attending to these injuries. Cancer cannot be inoculated against, but it can be treated. Cellular and DNA damage cannot be prevented, but can be addressed post hoc. Psychological derangement and distress, and spiritual emptiness, are perennials, and more likely to occur in the constricted environments of a startship than in the stimulus-rich homes and habitats of our utopian collectives, but even they can be coaxed back towards wholeness and health by the right strategies. Solace is possible. And so the mission goes on. For the crew, about a third of their waking hours are given over to ship’s business, a third to health-checks and treatments, leaving a few hours of leisure time per artificial day.

In the case of a ship’s emergency — as now, aboard the Sβ Oubliette — the leisure time is eaten into, and the duty absorbs more of the day. But the healthcare is never stinted.

As for corridors: the interior of any given startship will be different, depending on design and purpose and aesthetics, but the basic structure is a cluster of moveable Meissner tetrahedra, linked together with smartcable. The interiors of these structures, being non-spheres of uniform diameter, are spun in a complex of spiral trajectories to mimic gravity. It’s a poor imitation, and extra work pushing limbs in exercise bands, compressing the body and — most of all — addressing calcium loss and density with medical interventions are also needful. But Meissner bodies make more livable interiors than the circular strips of ribbon rotated like merry-go-round, like in your moving-along picture show Two Thousand And One Odysseys. Those are very tricky to live in, believe me. Some places do operate them: usually as temporary structures while larger, more stable ones are being built. But you wouldn’t want to live in such a rotating strip. Turn around suddenly — turn your head too quickly — and you’ll start puking. Large-diameter slow-spinning Meissner bodies, by slowly moving the 3D space on an in-logic inaround, is a much more tolerable arrangement.

You don’t care about any of that. Why would you?

This is an extract from Adam Roberts’s (Gollancz), the latest pick for the ��è��Ƶ Book Club. Sign up and read along with us here.

Why Adam Roberts set out to write a sci-fi utopia, not a dystopia

Adam Roberts — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 08:45:21 +0000

Adam Roberts’ Lake of Darkness opens as two space ships investigate a black hole

Science Photo Library / Alamy Stock Photo

The starting point for this novel was that I wanted to write utopian fiction. I hadn’t done this before: all my previous novels have been straight science fiction. But utopia, the genre that imagines a better, or a perfect, world, is older than science fiction: the first utopian novel, the work that coined the term, was written by Thomas More all the way back in 1516. I was interested in what happened to the mode: More’s Utopia generated lots of imitators. Through the 17th and 18^th ��Գٳܰ��,��. It was a major genre in the 19th century and into the 20th: Erewhon (1872) by Samuel Butler; William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1892), H. G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia (1905), B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948). Consider Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), one of the most impactful novels ever published in the US: a huge bestseller, it led to the creation of hundreds of “Bellamy Clubs” across that country and the founding of a Nationalist Party to run for the US presidency, with the aim of actualising Bellamy’s utopia there. But nowadays? Nobody really does utopia. Instead we are absolutely awash with dystopias, versions of the worst, not the best, possible future: The Hunger Games, The Road, Divergent, The Maze Runner, various Cyberpunk hellscapes, Battle Royale, Oryx and Crake, a great dismal river of books and films and video games. It’s an interesting question as to why utopia has gone out of fashion, and why dystopia is now so popular. Why has it gone out of fashion?

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One answer might be that utopia is unstoryable. When my creative students come to me with their premises for writing, their brilliant science fiction conceits and imagined worlds, I ask them: in this idea, where is the conflict? Because: no conflict, no drama; no drama, no story. Writing the perfect utopia is hard because there can be, by definition, no conflict in the perfect realm. I said nobody writes utopia nowadays and you might object: what about Iain M. Banks’s Culture series? Isn’t that a utopian space? But actually Banks rarely explores that, because the radical happiness of Culture life isn’t conducive to story: instead Banks’s novels are about the Culture’s dangerous secret-service organisation, Special Circumstances, which goes into all manner of non-utopian worlds and alien species where they can have adventures. In my novel it is likewise: in order for there to be a story, for characters to have adventures, I take them out of the comforts of utopia, confront them with horrors, dangers, monsters.

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But I wanted to do more than this: I wanted to investigate the logic of utopia itself. Is utopia possible? Not “can the world be a little better?” – obviously it can – but could we reorganise society so as to perfect it, to make a utopia? Some years ago, I was invited to give the keynote at the Utopiales conference, an event that takes place at various locations around Europe every year. The year I went it was in Tarragona, a beautiful place in Spain. I gave my keynote, the nub of which was: utopia as a mode can’t evade the crunch point of human nature. Some utopias are authoritarian (Thomas More’s original utopia is this, for instance) where structures of authority and force compel the utopian citizens to live in harmony. Others are bottom-up, predicated on the notion that if this or that material or psychological impediment were removed, human beings would just naturally live together in bliss. I must say: I don’t think either of these are viable, practically speaking. As literary critic John Carey puts it, what all utopias share is the desire “to a greater or lesser extent, to eliminate real people”.

This bold, experimental slice of deep-space sci-fi is just brilliant

In Adam Roberts's Lake of Darkness, two spaceships meet to study a black hole. Their research comes to an abrupt halt, however, when crew members start dying horribly, says Emily H. Wilson

In my Utopiales keynote I argued that the most convincing utopia in culture is the TV show Teletubbies. These beings (I’m not sure what they are: posthuman genetically altered cyborgs perhaps), these ’tubbies, do live according to utopian principles, but only because they are little children. Their needs are easily catered for, they are easily distracted and entertained, they are happy in their world. Adults would find Teletubbyland a frustrating and terrible place to live: monotonous, understimulating, restrictive. My argument, in other words, was that there is something radically infantilising about utopia as a concept, something puerile in the strict sense of the word. After the lecture there was a reception, and I wandered around the venue with a glass of wine in my hand chatting to people. Some attendees chatted with me about my talk, but there were a number of people there who “cut” me, literally turned their back to me as I approached. I was puzzled by this, until the conference organiser explained: Utopiales attracts scholars and academics interested in literary and cultural representations of utopia, but it also attracts actual utopians, people who plan to make utopia a reality: as it might be, wealthy American businessmen who, having made their fortune, have retired and plan to buy land and construct a utopian community. These people thought I was mocking them with my keynote. They were angry with me. Well, I’m sorry they thought I was insulting them. But I stand by my view, and in Lake of Darkness I apply social theory, imagined space opera technology and a series of particular characters and situation to the idea of utopia according to that view. Adam Roberts’s (Gollancz) is the latest pick for the ��è��Ƶ Book Club. Sign up and read along with us here.

11 of the best science fiction books for holiday reading

Adam Roberts — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 18:00:00 +0000

Eyes of the Void, Sea of Tranquility and The Memory Librarian are among our top sci-fi novels to read this holiday

Why Le Guin’s science fiction surpasses mere thought experiments

Adam Roberts — Mon, 29 Jan 2018 13:16:32 +0000

On the passing of a hugely imaginative and popular writer who also provided science fiction and fantasy with a conscience

If I were a Martian, I’d start running now

Adam Roberts — Mon, 29 May 2017 09:00:41 +0000

We come in peace…

Jim Watson/AFP/Getty

Exploration is so core to science fiction we might almost rename the genre “Exploration Fiction”. The genre is defined by, and packed with, stories of exploring space (“to boldly go” and all that), and of exploring time in the saddle of H. G. Wells’s time machine and its very many successors. Most of Jules Verne’s novels send characters exploring the world in balloons, submarines, trains and mega-boats.

Occasionally, they explore the world beyond Earth aboard ballistic capsules, or even on a chunk of Earth knocked off by a comet. I’m old enough to remember Carl Sagan’s Cosmos (1980), recently remade with Neil deGrasse Tyson, which used the notion of flying through the universe in a strangely under-furnished spaceship as a way to convey various galactic wonders. Here was the 19th-century scientist/explorer, extrapolated into the future. The British science-fiction writer John Wyndham defined humanity by what he called “the outward urge”. Maybe it’s just in us: this desire to explore.

One striking thing about the way exploration figures in SF is that – with a very few exceptions – it is almost always benign. I suppose we tend to think of “exploration” as a natural and positive extension of our universal human curiosity about the world; that is, the curiosity that all children exhibit, a “why is the sky blue?” school of thinking. Star Trek’s Federation operates according to a Prime Directive of non-interference in the cultures it explores. Verne’s Captain Nemo is a dedicated anti-colonialist. From Wells’s aggressive Martians to Doctor Who’s alien invader of the week, in SF it is vastly more likely that the imperial aggressors will be aliens coming here, rather than humans going there. When we imagine ourselves exploring the universe we tend to do it in the spirit of the Apollo landings: we go in peace, we tell ourselves, for all humankind.

Because it’s there

But the long history of actual exploration really doesn’t tell that story. I dare say, from time to time, people have explored the world with the same disinterestedness that mountaineer George Mallory proposed for Everest, “because it’s there”: a line treasured by the first man to climb that mountain, Edmund Hillary. But Hillary was hardly a typical explorer. Most exploration has been conducted by people who are checking out which chunks of the rest of the world would be most lucrative to invade and despoil. You can’t colonise the world without some reconnaissance, any more than you can make an empire-omelette without breaking human-eggs.

European imperialists rarely put it in those terms, of course: they spoke of spreading civilisation. The disingenuousness of this is toxic because it does, as it were, the opposite of what true exploration should do. It conceals the truth rather than revealing it. It hides things away instead of mapping them out plainly. And it becomes habitual. Did I refer to Mount Everest, a few sentences ago, rather than Mount Sagarmāthā? Did I drop the name of the prominent white man, but omit to mention Tenzing Norgay, who stepped onto the peak simultaneously with him? More to the point, did my putting it in those terms ring any warning bells for you?

Exploration has never been neutral, and it’s hard to believe that future exploration of the cosmos will be different. So: doesn’t SF have a duty to flavour its fantasies of boldly going with a smidgen of ideological honesty? “Exploration Fiction” is, after all, better placed than any other kind of literature to explore exploration itself.

is at Barbican, London, 7.30 pm, 15 June 2017

��è��Ƶ’s best summer reading

Adam Roberts — Wed, 29 Jul 2015 17:00:00 +0000

A chance to reflect: several stories consider how we handle nature (Image: Bruno Barbey/Magnum Photos) TIME and space, death and hope: that about covers it, surely? If you’re looking for a little light reading for the summer, the best science writing and science fiction are – to coin a phrase – boldly going where none have yet gone. Published last year and nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards, Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem (Tor), translated by Ken Liu, is a mix of satisfying hard-SF – those au fait with orbital mechanics won’t need to have the titular problem explained – and a fascinating glimpse inside modern China. But it is a rare novelist who can combine literary skill with properly researched hard science, and in this respect, Kim Stanley Robinson’s is streets ahead of the competition. A starship is 160 years into its voyage: two huge wheels, spun to imitate gravity, contain 12 inhabited ecosystems, from tropical forest to tundra, each with their own human population, maximised for biological diversity. We follow the ship though decades as Robinson brilliantly dramatises the action of entropy in complex systems. Crops fail; kilometre-long artificial lights die, leaving whole biomes in the freezing dark; lakes wash away their beds and start to corrode the fabric of the ship. The crew make repairs, their vessel becoming ever more of a botched job, and increasingly prone to further breakdowns. The technical challenges superbly illuminate the human dramas, and vice versa. This is science fiction at its very best.

“We follow the ship through decades. Crops fail; lights die, leaving whole biomes in the freezing dark”

Australian author James Bradley’s is a beautifully written meditation on climate collapse, concentrating on three generations of an Australian family. Bradley skilfully evokes the particularity of lived experience, and the novel is full of vivid little moments, although its real triumph is in setting these in their larger context: a world wrecked by storms and floods, changes in vegetation and the collapse of bird and bee populations. The main task climate science faces is getting people to understand how serious the situation is without tipping them over into nihilism. Bradley’s short, intense novel is as much a hymn to hope as it is a warning. is the latest example of Victor Pelevin’s unique blend of satire and SF extrapolation. The high-tech city of Byzantium floats in the sky over Urkania, its citizens entertained by specialist porn and staged wars. Down below, the Orks live primitive, exploited but more authentic lives. The satirical contrast between luxury above and poverty below is not subtle. This is an angry, funny novel, crammed with puns and wordplay. (Translator Andrew Bromfield does a bang-up job of replicating these in English.) “Byz” is a distorting mirror version of the decadent West, a realm of atrophied liberalism and too much wealth. The age of consent is 46. People have sex with full-sized robot dolls, which can be any age you want. Pelevin bounces about, energetically and crudely, and fashions a gonzo delight. Death becomes us: mortality is a popular literary theme this year (Image: Alejandro Ayala/Rex Shutterstock) From dying societies to dying individuals. Raymond Tallis’s latest book, , opens starkly: “death is nothing” and indeed “less than nothing, an omni-ravenous zero”. “Those whom we call ‘the dead’ neither enjoy their peace nor endure their loss.” Accordingly, Tallis writes his own obituary looking back rather than forward, going over the life previously lived by the corpse once known as “RT”. The result is a book full of striking, thoughtful insight, defamiliarising the everyday things we all take for granted. Its prose-poetry will either delight or infuriate, and reveals an author unafraid of ending up in Private Eye‘s Pseud’s Corner: “unimpoverished psychogeography”, “a maculate pattern of warmths and coolths” and “the merely utile” are a taste of what to expect. Tallis doesn’t simply stroll, he “undertakes set-piece ambulations”. Working out at the gym “instantiates the essence of the burdensome”. A comfy chair is “an ergonomically friendly receptacle”. In an age when books of popular science tend to adopt a chatty style halfway to dumbing down, Tallis’s commitment to his rich, difficult and estranging idiom is admirable. Or commercially suicidal. Conceivably both.

“Tallis’s commitment to his rich, difficult idiom is admirable. Or commercially suicidal. Conceivably both”

A different approach to death informs Chris Adrian and Eli Horowitz’s witty (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). When Jim dies suddenly, his widow Jane is startled to discover that he signed his head over to a cryonics company called Polaris. Angry at what she sees as a desecration, she threatens litigation and tries to retrieve the head. Meanwhile, in what may be a computer simulation, post-mortem Jim is told he must shed all of his memories and loves in order to move on to his “debut”, the passage of his connectome (“the totality of his neurological connections”) into endless life. Jim finds this hard to do, and there is warmth and poignancy in the dual narratives of his and Jane’s rather different struggles to hold on to something that death has violated. At the heart of this novel is the portrait of a marriage, flawed but also loving and enduring. It is movingly done. Kate Atkinson’s new novel really needs to be read as a companion-piece to her last, . The two together may well be the most eloquent writing about death I have ever read. In Life After Life we follow Ursula Todd as she is born, dies, is born again, and dies again, through early flu, an accident, and so on, over and over, each time lasting a little longer. Slowly, a sense of her repeating existence seeps into her mind, and she tries to direct events with the aim of saving the life of her beloved brother, Teddy, who is shot down over Berlin in a second world war bombing raid. A God in Ruins tells the story from Teddy’s point of view: an ordinary, linear life of small satisfactions and many trivial disappointments, from childhood through war and finally into old age and his death in a care home. The narrative, like that of Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), jumps restlessly from future to past, creating a deliberate, powerful flattening of the events of Teddy’s life. It all comes to a piercing conclusion as the various foci resolve into two moments: the Berlin air raid and Teddy’s impending death. Emotionally truer than the studied pretentiousness of Tallis, more nuanced than the cartoon exaggerations of Adrian and Horowitz, it is extraordinary writing.

Six to savour

The 28 stories in China Miéville’s Three Moments of an Explosion (Macmillan) are familiarly strange, full of eloquent monstrosity. A burning stag runs through a city, icebergs float over towns. Miéville’s vision has a fragmentary force, and this mosaic text does it proud. Darran Anderson’s Imaginary Cities (Influx Press) is a big, bustling book that looks at real cities through the prism of imaginary ones, from city planning to science fiction and everything in between. Anderson’s nimble study is never less than stimulating. Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers (Harvill Secker) may be too tricksy for some. It is also frequently amazing, the first work of fiction to engage fully with the internet and its influence on modern living. Claire North’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (Orbit) recently won the John Campbell Memorial Award. Harry lives his life over and over, always the same – until he discovers others like him. By talking to those younger or older he can pass messages along to the future or the past. North builds her clever conceit into an emotionally satisfying novel. John Higgs wrote well-received biographies of Timothy Leary and The KLF. In Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making sense of the twentieth century (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), he broadens his intellectual reach to encompass modernism, situationism, chaos theory, indeterminacy and almost every other byway of that epoch. Higgs’s plate-spinning act is a fine example of learning worn lightly. Finally, Brian Dillon’s The Great Explosion: Gunpowder, the great war, and a disaster on the Kent marshes (Penguin) tells the story of the explosion of the Faversham Gunpowder Works in 1916: safety was compromised as a result of pressure to boost production, and 200 workers were killed in a blast that shook houses as far away as Norwich. Dillon situates this story in a wider account of the Kentish landscape.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Science takes a vacation”

On the pain of others: The case for animal rights

Adam Roberts — Tue, 16 Dec 2014 18:00:00 +0000

Dilemma: is it morally better not to exist than to face early death? (Image: Fabrice Picard/Agence VU/Camera Press)

From the religious to the radical, three new books argue that hurting animals is as bad as hurting people. Do the arguments really stand up?

MOST of us agree that gratuitous cruelty to animals is wrong. But why? Is it because people who are cruel to animals are more likely to be cruel to human beings? Or is it because the animals have an absolute right not to suffer? Then again, are there more complex arguments about rights and responsibilities to be made?

It’s fascinating territory to judge by three books published this year. Those who doubt the circumstances implicit in the second question above should taking a detour throughThe Link Between Animal Abuse and Human Violence, which caused a minor storm in 2009.

Edited by theologian Andrew Linzey, the essays demonstrate statistically that those who abuse animals for fun are more likely to abuse other human beings. This came as a shock to many, but it is commonsense really. Think of the popular notion of the serial killer who learns his ghastly craft by torturing pets, not to mention the everyday desensitisation to animal suffering caused by killing and eating them, even with the moral proviso of humane farming.

One of the essays introduces the notion of “animal abuse denial”, a phrase coined, presumably, on the model of “Holocaust deniers”. Most of us are deniers: we have an inkling that, for example, the products we buy and our food choices come at some costs to the animals, but we push such reality aside.

We have an inkling that our food choices come at some costs to the animals, but we push such reality aside

This poses larger questions, though. The vast populations of cows, pigs and chickens exist only because we raise them for food. A world of vegetarians would be a world without such animals because there would be no economic reason to raise them. The claim that non-existence is morally preferable to one that ends in premature abattoir death seems, at the least, debatable.

Coming up to date, Stephen Moore’s collection Divinanimality goes straight to the intrinsic worth argument – on spiritual and religious grounds. The title (from the French philosopher Jacques Derrida) sees animals collectively as “radically other” in ways akin to the “radical otherness” of God, so as to position humans and animals within a shared sphere of mutual respect and care.

That the Christian God is incarnated as a human, and not an animal as in the Egyptian, Sumerian and Greek traditions, doesn’t seem to trouble the exclusively Christian contributors to Divinanimality. A Muslim or Jewish perspective might have helpfully broadened the case.

David Naguib Pellow also takes no prisoners in his energetically written polemic Total Liberation. This is a call for direct action. “All oppression is linked!” he rants. “Never apologise for your rage!” and “Liberation from government and market!” Pellow’s aim (the title of his second chapter) is nothing less than: “Justice for the Earth and all its animals”, and the book is as broad-brush as the agitprop slogans suggest.

Rather more meditative, but still polemical, is Interspecies Ethics by Cynthia Willett, which styles the behaviour of young African and Indian elephants as an insurgency against human oppression. Adolescent males, she writes, alone or in gangs, “have been attacking villages and ploughing under swathes of crops in retaliation for the murder of their families and the destruction of their tribal land”. And this is no figure of speech. “Animals are like us,” she insists. We must “secure animal rights … support cross-species solidarity with animal co-workers and co-inhabitants of interspecies communities”.

Unlike these authors, I am more cautious, tending to clap the phrase “animal rights” in scare quotes. That’s because I’m committed to a model of rights that is simultaneously inalienable and defined by their reciprocal relationship to social duties. Accordingly, I’m not sure I make sense of a concept of “rights” that doesn’t include “responsibilities”. My rights are the limiting case of how society must treat me; my responsibilities are the structures of obligation I owe to society. The two necessarily go together. If animals have rights, what are their responsibilities?

If a lion has the right not to be hunted to death, does it also have a responsibility not to eat me? Frankly, I don’t trust the lion to keep his half of the deal. Maybe lions are too majestic an example, so let’s ask: if rats have the right to be left in peace do they also have the responsibility not to spread disease and wreck our sewerage system?

Again, if the smallpox virus, limited now to a few lab-held samples, has the right not to be eradicated completely (as some think it does), should it also have the responsibility to abstain from killing off humans by the billion? I’m being tendentious, I admit. Elephants are large, noble animals; the smallpox virus is small and horrid. The question might be where do we draw the line, except that these books argue there shouldn’t be a line.

I am not convinced. Let me offer a good rebuttal in the story of US naturalist Timothy Treadwell, who thought he had established cross-species solidarity with certain Alaskan bears.

In Werner Herzog’s excellent 2005 documentary about Treadwell’s life, Grizzly Man, there’s a scene where the director listens on headphones, horrified, to a tape of Treadwell’s final minutes after the bears had refused solidarity, decided that he looked tasty and eaten him. Herzog turns to Jewel Palovak, the owner of the tape, and a close friend of Treadwell, and says “you should never listen to it [the tape], and you should rather destroy it”.

Read on…

Divinanimality: Animal theory, creaturely theology by Stephen D. Moore, Fordham University Press, $33/£22.46

Total Liberation: The power and promise of animal rights and the radical earth movement by David Naguib Pellow, University of Minnesota Press, $22.95/£14.21

Interspecies Ethics by Cynthia Willett, Columbia University Press, $30/£20.50

This article appeared in print under the headline “Animal rights and wrongs”

Article amended on 1 January 1970

When this article was first published, it mistook the smallpox virus for a bacillus.

Adam Roberts, Author at ��è����Ƶ