Reviews

Ed Parks is a founding editor of my favorite magazine of all time, The Believer. So I was thrilled when it was announced that he’d be writing an online monthly SF column for the Los Angeles Times. In its first installment, Astral Weeks reviewed HARM by Brian W. Aldiss and Under My Roof by Nick Mamatas. Now in his second outing, Parks turns his attention to Adam Roberts’ Heinlein-esque near future novel of revenge, Gradisil.

He starts off by quoting from the very first paragraph of the book, which he describes as “as elegant as invitations come,” and concludes that, “By the paragraph’s three-word finale, you might find yourself hooked.” (I did!)

Parks finds buried references to Vladimir Nabokov and allusions to Charles Portis, while noting that Roberts, while crafting a book spiced with literary illusions and satire, nonetheless “keeps those pages turning and richly characterizes his generations-spanning dramatis personae.”

Parks has written one of those wonderful reviews that obviously demonstrates a deep appreciate for the work while providing very little in the way of quotables – my publicity director loves these – but he clearly “gets” what Roberts is doing. So rather than tell you anymore, why not go read the review for yourself.

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.”