Adam RobertsinAdam’s NotebookBrave New WorldI’ve undergone, speaking personally, something of a volte face with respect to the role SF fandom, and more specifically that fan-labour of…3d ago13d ago1
Adam RobertsinAdam’s NotebookSome Saturns‘Saturn,’ says Ross Anderson, ‘is the best planet.’Oct 2Oct 2
Adam RobertsinAdam’s NotebookDavid Gilmour, ‘Luck and Strange’ (2024)Irrelevant preamble: on only one occasion in my life have I been in the same room as David Gilmour. In 2018 Polly Samson was inducted as a…Sep 281Sep 281
Adam RobertsinAdam’s NotebookAd Bellum PurificandumKenneth Burke’s epigraph to his Grammar of Motives (1945) is ‘Ad bellum purificandum’— ‘for the purification of war.’ Mark Edmundson quotes…Sep 26Sep 26
Adam RobertsinAdam’s NotebookMoney, it’s a Gas/Grab That Cash With Both Hands and Make a StashA while back, fifteen years or so, I started writing a story for kids. Children’s literature, or YA, has never been my thing: not because I…Sep 243Sep 243
Adam RobertsinAdam’s NotebookThe Earthquake God SpeaksAnd it is also creative, this mad Restlessness of men. I shudder down their cities; They build them up again.Sep 22Sep 22
Adam RobertsinAdam’s NotebookDumas’ Electric MusketeerAlexandre Dumas’s Les Trois Mousquetaires (1844) first introduces us to d’Artagnan, a young man up from the provinces to Paris, hoping to…Sep 211Sep 211
Adam RobertsinAdam’s NotebookChristina Scull and Wayne G Hammond (eds) ‘The Collected Poems of J R R Tolkien’ (HarperCollins…A big book, in three volumes: fully 1500 pages of Tolkienian verse. It’s a very handsome piece of book production: good quality paper, well…Sep 131Sep 131
Adam RobertsinAdam’s NotebookViktor Rydberg, ‘The Freebooter of the Baltic’ (1857)Viktor Rydberg was, perhaps, the most important Swedish novelist of the nineteenth-century, though he’s little known in the UK, what with…Sep 12Sep 12
Adam RobertsinAdam’s NotebookMusée des Prole ArtsAbout suffering they were often wrong, the Old Masters: distracted by wealth and rank, as if pain only matters when it afflicts the high…Sep 10Sep 10
