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Adrienne Martini reviews her first Pyr title for Bookslut, proclaiming that Adam Roberts’ Gradisil has blown her socks off, which are “currently in orbit around Jupiter.” This is a fun review, which gets right to the essense of the book and makes you smile while doing so, with sentiments that start like this:

“Like a late-night infomercial — wait: There’s more. Roberts keeps adding layers of pure genre porn like quantum space planes over a structure with rich emotional resonance. He takes us on an old-fashioned catalog of space wonders and cultures whenever we’re in the Uplands. He envisions what will happen to language over the next two millennia, dropping silent letters from his prose as the century passes. If that weren’t enough, he sketches out a plausible outline for the geopolitical future that is completely believable and never bogs down in detail.”

I encourage you to read the whole review, which does a good job of expressing why Gradisil works without any major spoilers, though as Adrienne says, “On its surface, Gradisil — the title is derived from a Viking myth rather than the cervical cancer vaccine — is a simple story about a driven man whose jones to escape the Earth causes nuclear-grade fallout that effects at least three generations of his offspring. That one line could describe any number of science fiction page-turners. Most writers, if given that brief, could weave lovely little stories that momentarily entertained but failed to leave any lasting impression. Roberts, however, isn’t most writers. His take on this brief is so exquisitely layered that it is hard to know where to begin teasing out what makes it all come together without giving away too many of the surprises.”

“Is it fair to read a novel as a stand-alone work, or must it necessarily be judged in the context of how it compares to what has gone before?,” asks Greg L. Johnson in his SFSite.com review of Adam Robert’s Gradisil. “A fine story, all by itself, and Gradisil can easily be read strictly as the story of one family’s involvement in the great events of their time. But … Gradisil’s reference points are the classic science fiction stories of rugged individuals engineering their way into space. There are echoes here of Arthur C. Clarke’s Islands in the Sky, Poul Anderson’s Tales of the Flying Mountains and, of course, Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.”

This wealth of influences, coupled with several literary allusions, causes Johnson to conclude, “Gradisil could easily have been-top heavy, its literary allusions and political commentary deadening the story with pretensions. That it doesn’t is evidence both of Robert’s skill as a novelist and the enduring power of an ages-old tragedy. Gradisil works well as a story in and of itself, its characters not necessarily admirable but very human in their flaws and prejudices.”