Adam Roberts: Salt On Stone

Adam Roberts is a new British SF author. There are always new British SF authors appearing, but the current crop - people like China Mieville and Alastair Reynolds and Charles Stross - seem to deserve the hype.

I think Roberts deserves more hype. Not that he's completely unsung - Salt, his first novel, was nominated for the Arthur C Clarke award, after all - but I get the impression he has a somewhat lower profile than his contemporaries. Maybe that's because he's writing what is, these days, somewhat less commercial SF; his novels weigh in at around the 300 page mark, and feature remarkably little in the way of space operatics or tech for the sake of tech.

What Roberts is doing is SF-as-metaphor, SF-as-literary-genre. His novels are less concerned with exploring the future than they are with using the tropes of SF to explore the lives of particular characters, or the implications of particular themes. So Salt, a tale of colonisation on a saline-rich world, is far more about the conflicts and characters involved than it is about the process of colonisation. In this way, it is perhaps a more personal brand of SF. And when it works, it really does work well.

So far, I've read the three novels he's published - Salt, On and Stone; all take their titles from the first word of the novel - and one novella, Park Polar. Of these, I would say Stone is far and away the standout. It's the story of a manic-depressive socipoath, in a society where criminal behaviour has been virtually eradicated, who is hired by some unknown employer to commit genocide - which, as hooks go, is not bad at all. Along the way, of course, the protagonist has to visit a variety of exotic worlds. To Roberts, the metaphoric and thematic potential of the worlds is arguably more important than scientific accuracy - for example, one stopping point is a pair of worlds orbiting so close as to be joined by a space elevator. As the planets are wracked by tidal forces, so the protagonist finds himself torn by the thought of the task ahead, and by the attachments to other people formed along the way.

The reason it works, I find, is that it is underplayed; it's all there if you want to look, but the focus is squarely on the character and the story. And lest anyone be concerned, the ending is as reassuringly hard science fiction as you could wish for.

One interesting thing about Roberts' work that I've found is that he seems to be much more comfortable writing in the first person. The books written in this way - Salt and Stone - are, in my opinion, significanlty better than his third-person work. They are more focused, more immediately engaging, and more rewarding. On, in particular, is disappointing; the story meanders with no apparent direction or purpose for far too long.

A couple of Adam Roberts' short stories (which I haven't read...yet) are available at Infinity Plus, and he writes a regular column for The Alien Online.