Search results for ""Author Adam Roberts""

Award nominated SF author Adam Roberts takes on Dickens in this festive zombie gorefest.Marley was dead. To begin with.The legendary Ebenezeer Scrooge sits in his house counting money. The boards that he has nailed up over the doors and the windows shudder and shake under the blows from the endless zombie hordes that crowd the streets hungering for his flesh and his miserly braaaaiiiiiinns!Just how did the happiest day of the year slip into a welter of blood, innards and shambling, ravenous undead on the snowy streets of old London town?Will the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future be able to stop the world from drowning under a top-hatted and crinolined zombie horde?It's the Dickensian Zombie Apocalypse - God Bless us, one and all!

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Young Forktongue Davy has visions; epilepsy, his Ma calls it. He's barely able to help around the family farm. But something about the lad is attracting attention: the menacing stranger who might be the angel of death himself; the women-only community at Wycombe; Daniel, sent by the mysterious Guz. They all want Davy for their own reasons. But what use can he be to anyone? He has visions of flight, but how can flight ever be possible in this shattered world? A simple farmboy, caught up in events beyond his power to control-but his visions may be the key to the future.

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In a world where we have been genetically engineered so that we can photosynthesise sunlight with our hair, hunger is a thing of the past, food an indulgence. The poor grow their hair, the rich affect baldness and flaunt their wealth by still eating.But other hungers remain ... The young daughter of an affluent New York family is kidnapped. The ransom demands are refused. A year later a young woman arrives at the family home claiming to be their long lost daughter. She has changed so much, she has lived on light, can anyone be sure that she has come home?Adam Roberts' new novel is yet another amazing melding of startling ideas and beautiful prose. Set in a New York of the future it nevertheless has echoes of a Fitzgeraldesque affluence and art-deco style. It charts his further progress as one of the most important writers of his generation.

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An entertaining and wide-ranging collection of science-fiction short stories featuring space aliens, spectacular inventions, futuristic technologies and vividly imagined worlds.Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, cloth-bound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. Classic Science Fiction Stories is selected and introduced by academic and science-fiction writer Adam Roberts.Classic Science Fiction Stories highlights not only famous writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, H. G. Wells and H. P. Lovecraft, but also gives voice to lesser known but equally inventive writers such as Florence McLandburgh and Ambrose Bierce. Spanning the 1750s to the early twentieth century, these mesmerizing and expertly crafted stories are by turns intriguing, terrifying and, at times, downright comic. Together they show how science fiction took root to develop into the global phenomenon it is today.

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WINNER OF THE BSFA AWARD FOR BEST NOVELJack Glass is the murderer. We know this from the start. Yet as this extraordinary novel tells the story of three murders committed by Glass the reader will be surprised to find out that it was Glass who was the killer and how he did it. And by the end of the book our sympathies for the killer are fully engaged.Riffing on the tropes of crime fiction (the country house murder, the locked room mystery) and imbued with the feel of golden age SF, JACK GLASS is another bravura performance from Roberts. Whatever games he plays with the genre, whatever questions he asks of the reader, Roberts never loses sight of the need to entertain and JACK GLASS has some wonderfully gruesome moments, is built around three gripping HowDunnits and comes with liberal doses of sly humour.Roberts invites us to have fun and tricks us into thinking about both crime and SF via a beautifully structured novel set in a society whose depiction challanges notions of crime, punishment, power and freedom. It is an extraordinary novel.

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Private Investigator Alma is caught up in another impossible murder. One of the world's four richest people may be dead - but nobody is sure which one. Hired to discover the truth behind the increasingly bizarre behaviour of the ultra-rich, Alma must juggle treating her terminally ill lover with a case which may not have a victim.Inspired by the films of Kubrick, this stand-alone novel returns to the near-future of THE REAL-TOWN MURDERS, and puts Alma on a path to a world she can barely understand. Witty, moving and with a mystery deep at its heart, this novel again shows Adam Roberts' mastery of the form.

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Alma is a private detective in a near-future England, a country desperately trying to tempt people away from the delights of Shine, the immersive successor to the internet. But most people are happy to spend their lives plugged in, and the country is decaying.Alma's partner is ill, and has to be treated without fail every 4 hours, a task that only Alma can do. If she misses the 5 minute window her lover will die. She is one of the few not to access the Shine.So when Alma is called to an automated car factory to be shown an impossible death and finds herself caught up in a political coup, she knows that getting too deep may leave her unable to get home. What follows is a fast-paced Hitchcockian thriller as Alma evades arrest, digs into the conspiracy, and tries to work out how on earth a dead body appeared in the boot of a freshly-made car in a fully-automated factory.

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The new Adam Roberts novel is a story of global apocalypse, old hatreds and new beginnings. It is his best novel to date.And this is how the world will end ...'The snow started falling on the sixth of September, soft noiseless flakes filling the sky like a swarm of white moths, or like static interference on your TV screen - whichever metaphor, nature or technology, you find the more evocative. Snow everywhere, all through the air, with that distinctive sense of hurrying that a vigorous snowfall brings with it. Everything in a rush, busy-busy snowflakes. And, simultaneously, paradoxically, everything is hushed, calm, as quiet as cancer, as white as death.And at the beginning people were happy.'But the snow doesn't stop. It falls and falls and falls. Until it lies three miles thick across the whole of the earth. Six billion people have died. Perhaps 150,000 survive. But those 150,000 need help, they need support, they need organising, governing.And so the lies begin. Lies about how the snow started. Lies about who is to blame. Lies about who is left. Lies about what really lies beneath.

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Good is a construct. Evil is a virus.The Starship Sa Niro and the Starship Sß Oubliette were in orbit around a black hole, one afternoon... by the end of the day, the crews of both starships were dead, victims of a single killer: Captain Alpha Raine.Raine claims he''s acting under the command of a voice emanating from the black hole: Mr Modo. No one believes him.Everyone knows that things go into black holes; nothing comes out.But something inexplicable has been happening to Raine, and whatever it is seems to be spreading. An historian studying serial killers from the 21st century interviews him... and then nearly kills someone herself. It becomes increasingly undeniable that there''s something inside that black hole... and it''s found a way out...

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A man is about to kill a cow. He discusses life and death and his right to kill with the compliant animal. He begins to suspect he may be about to commit murder. But kills anyway ...It began when the animal rights movement injected domestic animals with artificial intelligences in a bid to have the status of animals realigned by the international court of human rights. But what is an animal that can talk? Where does its intelligence end at its machine intelligence begin? And where might its soul reside?As we place more and more pressure on the natural world and become more and more divorced Adam Roberts' new novel posits a world where nature can talk back, and can question us and our beliefs.Roberts is an award winning author at the peak of his powers and each new novel charts an exciting new direction while maintaining a uniformly high level of literary achievement.

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Adam Roberts turns his attention to answering the Fermi Paradox with a taut and claustrophobic tale that echoes John Carpenter's The Thing.Two men while away the days in an Antarctic research station. Tensions between them build as they argue over a love-letter one of them has received. One is practical and open. The other surly, superior and obsessed with reading one book - by the philosopher Kant.As a storm brews and they lose contact with the outside world they debate Kant, reality and the emptiness of the universe. They come to hate each other, and they learn that they are not alone.

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This is the first new complete literary biography of H G Wells for thirty years, and the first to encompass his entire career as a writer, from the science fiction of the 1890s through his fiction and non-fiction writing all the way up to his last publication in 1946. Adam Roberts provides a comprehensive reassessment of Wells’ importance as a novelist, short-story writer, a theorist of social prophecy and utopia, journalist and commentator, offering a nuanced portrait of the man who coined the phrases ‘atom bomb’, ‘League of Nations’ ‘the war to end war’ and ‘time machine’, who wrote the world’s first comprehensive global history and invented the idea of the tank. In these twenty-six chapters, Roberts covers the entirety of Wells’ life and discusses every book and short story he produced, delivering a complete vision of this enduring figure.

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Russia, 1946, the Nazis recently defeated. Stalin gathers half a dozen of the top Soviet science fiction authors in a dacha in the countryside somewhere. Convinced that the defeat of America is only a few years away, and equally convinced that the Soviet Union needs a massive external threat to hold it together, to give it purpose and direction, he tells the writers: 'I want you to concoct a story about aliens poised to invade earth ... I want it to be massively detailed, and completely believable. If you need props and evidence to back it up, then we can create them. But when America is defeated, your story must be so convincing that the whole population of Soviet Russia believes in it - the population of the whole world!' The little group of writers gets down to the task and spends months working on it. But then new orders come from Moscow: they are told to drop the project; Stalin has changed his mind; forget everything about it. So they do. They get on with their lives in their various ways; some of them survive the remainder of Stalin's rule, the changes of the 50s and 60s. And then, in the aftermath of Chernobyl, the survivors gather again, because something strange has started to happen. The story they invented in 1946 is starting to come true ...A typically mind-blowing SF novel from one of the genre's literary stars.

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Are we doomed? Is an almighty power or an earth-shattering meteor waiting for us just around the corner?; In this thought-provoking book, Professor Adam Roberts explores our many different cultural visions of the end of the world - likely and unlikely, mundane and bizarre - and what they say about how we see ourselves and our societies. What is it is that we are really afraid of? An uncaring universe; an uncontrollable environment; the human capacity for destruction; or just our own, personal apocalypse - our mortality?; From last man and dying earth fiction to zombies swarming on screen and the ruined landscapes of immersive gaming, via sweeping contagions, invading aliens, falling bombs and rising robots, buckle up for the end of the world.

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The This is the new social media platform everyone is talking about. Allow it to be injected into the roof of your mouth and it will grow into your brain, allow you to connect with others without even picking up your phone. Its followers are growing. Its detractors say it is a cult. But for one journalist, hired to do a puff-piece interview with their CEO, it will change the world forever.Adan just wants to stay at home with his smart-companion Elegy - phone, friend, confidante, sex toy. But when his mother flees to Europe and joins a cult, leaving him penniless, he has to enlist in the army. Sentient robots are invading America, but it seems Adan has a surprising ability to survive their attacks. He has a purpose, even if he doesn''t know what it is.And in the far future, war between a hivemind of AIs and the remnants of humanity is coming to its inevitable end. But one woman has developed a weapon which might change the course of the war. It''s just a pity s

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The 1840s. Railway Baron Sir Martin Malprelate has been laying waste to the warren of Camden; buying up houses and clearing streets for his new railway line linking King’s Cross with the prosperous town of Middlemarch. He stands to make his fortune ever more vast and to earn the loathing of all who attempt to stand up to him. Little wonder, then, that he meets a violent end on a foggy street after walking out of a particularly bitter meeting with outraged residents facing eviction. But the cause of his death causes more wonder. How could he have possibly fallen beneath the wells of a speeding spectral train running on tracks not yet even built? Sir Martin’s death is investigated by the police, but the company employ one of its senior engineers, Mr Bryde, to pursue his own investigation. Bryde uncovers a network of resentment and conspiracy, popular opposition to the expansion of the railways, agitating workers, scheming shareholders, corrupt politicians and a gallery of varied and grotesque characters, all of whom had some stake in the old man’s death. Lacing it’s realism with both social commentary and the gothic imaginations of the time The Murder of Sir Martin Malprelate is a vivid recreation of a London stalked by poverty and haunted by visions of demons and ghosts; a world of slums, lavish wealth and opium dens. The narrative is coloured by exotic characters all too ready to believe in the supernatural but the plot is driven by rationality and the all too real motivations of greed and revenge.

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YOUR COMPLETE GUIDE TO WRITING AWESOME AND AMAZING FICTION FROM ANOTHER DIMENSION.This is an authoritative and engaging introduction to writing science fiction and fantasy for the complete beginner. This book provides all the information, guidance, and advice you need to write great science fiction to captivate your readers. It will help you understand how the genre works, the big dos and don'ts - as well as giving you the inspiration and motivation you actually need to write. Written by a leading science fiction novelist and a Professor in Creative Writing at the University of London - you'll discover how to let your creativity flow, create incredible worlds, and get your novel finished.ABOUT THE SERIESThe Teach Yourself Creative Writing series helps aspiring authors tell their story. Covering a range of genres from science fiction and romantic novels, to illustrated children's books and comedy, this series is packed with advice, exercises and tips for unlocking creativity and improving your writing. And because we know how daunting the blank page can be, we set up the Just Write online community at tyjustwrite, for budding authors and successful writers to connect and share.

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An interstellar craft is decelerating after its century-long voyage. Its destination is V538 Aurigae ?, a now-empty planet dominated by one gigantic megastructure, a conical mountain of such height that its summit is high above the atmosphere. The ship's crew of five hope to discover how the long-departed builders made such a colossal thing, and why: a space elevator? a temple? a work of art? Its resemblance to the mountain of purgatory lead the crew to call this world Dante.In our near future, the United States is falling apart. A neurotoxin has interfered with the memory function of many of the population, leaving them reliant on their phones as makeshift memory prostheses. But life goes on. For Ottoline Barragão, a regular kid juggling school and her friends and her beehives in the back garden, things are about to get very dangerous, chased across the north-east by competing groups, each willing to do whatever it takes to get inside Ottoline's private network and recover the secret inside.Purgatory Mount, Adam Roberts's first SF novel for three years, combines wry space opera and a fast-paced thriller in equal measure. It is a novel about memory and atonement, about exploration and passion, and like all of Roberts's novels it's not quite like anything else.Shortlisted for the 2021 BSFA award for Best Novel!

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It is 1958 and France's first nuclear submarine, Plongeur, leaves port for the first of its sea trials. On board, gathered together for the first time, one of the Navy's most experienced captains and a tiny skeleton crew of sailors, engineers and scientists. The Plongeur makes her first dive and goes down, and down and down... Out of control, the submarine plummets to a depth where the pressure will crush her hull, killing everyone on board, and beyond.The pressure builds, the hull protests, the crew prepare for death, the boat reaches the bottom of the sea and finds... nothing.Her final dive continues, the pressure begins to relent, but the depth gauge is useless. They have gone miles down. Hundreds of miles, thousands...And so it goes on. And on board the crew succumb to madness, betrayal, religious mania and murder. Has the Plongeur left the limits of our world and gone elsewhere?Contains 33 full-page pen and ink illustrations by acclaimed artist Mahendra Singh, who previously illustrated an edition of THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK.Adam Roberts and Mahendra Singh have revisited Jules Verne's classic SF novel, and together they have come up with a unique vision.

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Young Forktongue Davy has visions. Epilepsy, his Ma calls it, and they mean he's barely able to help around the family farm. But something about the lad, weakling though he is, is attracting attention. The menacing stranger, who might be the angel of death himself; the inhabitants of the women-only community at Wycombe, whose reach extends over the whole of the Chilterns; Daniel from the mysterious Guz. They all want Davy for their own reasons. But what use can he be to anyone? How can he be the key to the coming war between Father John in the North and the women of Wycombe. He has visions of flight, but how can flight ever be possible in this shattered world, where technology has almost wholly reverted to pre-industrial levels? A simple farmboy, kidnapped for reasons he cannot fathom, caught up in events beyond his power to control-but his visions may be the key to the future.

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The This is the new social media platform everyone is talking about. Allow it to be injected into the roof of your mouth and it will grow into your brain, allow you to connect with others without even picking up your phone. Its followers are growing. Its detractors say it is a cult. But for one journalist, hired to do a puff-piece interview with their CEO, it will change the world forever.Adan just wants to stay at home with his smart-companion Elegy - phone, friend, confidante, sex toy. But when his mother flees to Europe and joins a cult, leaving him penniless, he has to enlist in the army. Sentient robots are invading America, but it seems Adan has a surprising ability to survive their attacks. He has a purpose, even if he doesn't know what it is.And in the far future, war between a hivemind of AIs and the remnants of humanity is coming to its inevitable end. But one woman has developed a weapon which might change the course of the war. It's just a pity she's trapped in an inescapable prison on a hivemind ship.

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‘I’m working on a novel intended to express the feel of England in Edward III’s time ... The fourteenth century of my novel will be mainly evoked in terms of smell and visceral feelings, and it will carry an undertone of general disgust rather than hey-nonny nostalgia’ – Anthony Burgess, 1973 The Black Prince is a brutal historical tale of chivalry, religious belief, obsession, siege and bloody warfare. From disorientating depictions of medieval battles to court intrigues and betrayals, the campaigns of Edward, the Black Prince, are brought to vivid life.This rambunctious book, based on a completed screenplay by Anthony Burgess, showcases Adam Roberts in complete control of the novel as a way of making us look at history with fresh eyes, all while staying true to the linguistic pyrotechnics and narrative verve of Burgess’s best work.

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Following the great success of our Gothic Fantasy, deluxe edition short story compilations, Ghosts, Horror, Science Fiction, Murder Mayhem and Crime & Mystery this latest title is packed with dark valleys, high mountain passes, dinosaurs and endless dark creations. Contains a fabulous mix of classic and brand new writing, with authors from the US, Canada, and the UK. New, contemporary and notable writers featured are: Rachel Verkade, Thomas Canfield, Kevin M. Folliard, David Sklar, David Tallerman, Sara M. Harvey, Sarah L. Byrne, John Walters, Ronald D. Ferguson, Michael Penncavage, James C. Simpson, Rebecca Schwarz, K.G. McAbee, and Mike Adamson. These appear alongside classic stories by authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, H. Rider Haggard, Jonathan Swift and Jules Verne.

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‘I’m working on a novel intended to express the feel of England in Edward III’s time ... The fourteenth century of my novel will be mainly evoked in terms of smell and visceral feelings, and it will carry an undertone of general disgust rather than hey-nonny nostalgia’ – Anthony Burgess, 1973 The Black Prince is a brutal historical tale of chivalry, religious belief, obsession, siege and bloody warfare. From disorientating depictions of medieval battles to court intrigues and betrayals, the campaigns of Edward, the Black Prince, are brought to vivid life.This rambunctious book, based on a completed screenplay by Anthony Burgess, showcases Adam Roberts in complete control of the novel as a way of making us look at history with fresh eyes, all while staying true to the linguistic pyrotechnics and narrative verve of Burgess’s best work.

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This authoritative edition was originally published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode. It brings together a unique combination of Browning's poetry and prose chosen from the whole range of his career to give the essence of his work and thinking. Browning's work ranges from the beguiling magic of 'The Pied Piper of Hamelin' to the epic book-length poem The Ring and the Book. This comprehensive selection includes over eighty of his shorter poems, amongst them his most famous and best-loved dramatic monologues, as well as the complete text of many of his longer poems (Pauline, Pippa Passes, 'Bishop Blougram's Apology'). It contains three books from The Ring and the Book and Browning's only significant piece of critical writing (the 'Essay on Shelley'). This edition also selects generously from the love letters between Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, as well as from Browning's more general correspondence - letters which cast a unique light upon the poems themselves, and poetry in general. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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