![]() Reading any of Roberts's 13 published science fiction novels I often find myself thinking of their author as the last true science fiction writer. But he is also a critic, and his fiction can not help but reflect both. In an illuminating review of Jack Glass, critic Jonathan McCalmont cracks open Adam Roberts's love-hate relationship with SF's self-regarding nostalgia. ![]() The fact that Ellery Queen was a "house name" for many pulp writers, among them SF legend Jack Vance, underlines the fact that these stories have more in common than separates them. It's also a detective novel, a locked-room mystery in the style of Dorothy L Sayers or Ellery Queen. The SF genre today is like your dad's prog rock LP collection, a last link to a lost youth.Īdam Roberts's Jack Glass is a science fiction novel about our nostalgia for science fiction novels, replete with the favourite devices of Golden Age SF. But now those kids are running out of middle age and wonder has been replaced with nostalgia. Space exploration, faster-than-light travel, cybernetic implants and virtual realities all stirred that fabled " sense of wonder" in the kids who grew up with them. Genre fiction recycles, repeats and repackages the same old ideas. If any kind of literature relies on the new and the innovative to excite the reader it is SF. ![]() ![]() The worst thing that ever happened to science fiction was getting confused with genre fiction. ![]()
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