Лучшие книги Адама Робертса

Что бы ни случилось, читатель, запомни: убийца — Стеклянный Джек, даже если преступление невозможно, даже если все улики указывают на другого. И в аристократических орбитальных особняках, и в трущобных пузырях пояса астероидов знают, что для Стеклянного Джека нет ничего невозможного. Его не остановят ни стражи порядка, ни вакуум, ни абсолютный холод, ни правительство, ни всемогущие, генетически модифицированные, корпоративные семейства, ни Закон, регулирующий каждый вздох любого гражданина. И потому не стоит удивляться, что когда Солнечную систему потрясли слухи о технологии, позволяющей перемещаться быстрее скорости света, в них тоже…

Мир на краю пропасти: чума уносит жизни миллионов, солнце выжигает посевы, тут и там начинаются войны, а люди, кажется, лишились остатков разума. Вы готовы к концу света?​ Нас готовят к нему на протяжении всей истории и все это уже было в книгах и фильмах, утверждает Адам Робертс — преподаватель литературы колледжа Роял Холлоуэй Лондонского университета, писатель, которого критики называют лучшим современным фантастом, и по совместительству историк жанра. «Вот и всё.» — это блестящий анализ наших представлений о гибели человечества, в которых отражаются состояние общества, психология индивида и масс, их заветные чаяния и страхи. Почему…

Работник знаменитого музея убит совершенно жутким способом: ему в глотку засунули... свежую треску! К счастью, перед смертью он успел оставить на стене таинственную надпись...
За дело берутся обаятельный, непьющий, некурящий, состоятельный, холостой специалист по самым сложным в мире анаграммам и очаровательная француженка, получившая диплом по криптологии в университете, где криптологию никогда не преподавали.
Неужели снова заговор?!
Неужели опять могущественное тайное общество?!
Да и еще раз да!
И пусть ученые оспаривают приведенные в книге данные, - их хлебом не корми, только дай что-нибудь оспорить!
Имейте в виду: в этой книге нет ничего, кроме фактов.
Даже шутки автора основаны на фактах. Фактах уморительно смешных, хотя и абсолютно... недостоверных!

Читайте самую ехидную пародию на легендарный "Код да Винчи" Дэна Брауна!

"Научно-фантастическая классика XXI века..." "Романы поразительной силы и глубины, не уступающие даже "Дюне". "От произведений этого автора надолго остается приятное послевкусие..." Все это - и многое другое - сказано о "Соли" и "Стене" - романах, созданных дебютантом британской фантастики Адамом Робертсом и равно вызвавших восторг и у критиков, и у читателей. Достаточно упомянуть, что "SFX" сравнивал "Стену" со "Страстями по Лейбовицу", a "Locus" писал о "Соли": "Лучший дебют в научной фантастике за десятилетия". Что здесь скажешь еще?...

Обычно, представителя фирмы по борьбе с вредителями, вызывают для того, что — бы он помог избавиться от тараканов или крыс. Но иногда, заказчик просит помочь в борьбе с другими вредителями. Очень необычными...

Открытие доктором Самуэлем Свифтом в Тихом океане двух островов, населенных лилипутами и великанами, привело к тому, что колониальная экспансия Англии была направлена и на них. Острова были захвачены, а местные жители порабощены...

Tighe lives on the Worldwall. It towers above his village and falls away below it. It is vast and unforgiving and it is everything they know. Life is hard on the Worldwall, little more than a clinging on for dear life. And then one day Tighe falls off the world. And falls, and falls and falls ...and survives. He finds a new part of the Worldwall, a city, more people than he ever imagined existed and a war. A war fought by the Popes and their armies. A war Tighe must join, a war that will take him on a journey into the heart of the mystery behind the Worldwall. ON is a superbly confident novel of a changed world. It has echoes of a Canticle for Leibowitz and The Book of the New Sun. It is a remarkable feat of imagination and sustained narrative drive. Its hero is immensely appealing. Coming after SALT it is evidence of an extraordinary SF career in the making.

Какие-то люди живут севернее, какие-то южнее. Какие-то бедно, какие-то богато. Кому-то укладывают модные прически, кого-то экономно стригут покороче. Волосы играют неожиданную роль в этом рассказе. Не самую главную, но важную. Этот рассказ заставит вас задуматься и о личности, и об обществе. О дружбе, и о предательстве. Об отдельно взятом ученом, и о корпорации. Для последователей Самсона, считавшего, что волосы дают силу.

В этой обманчиво простой истории ученый пытается раскрыть тайну, которая поначалу кажется незначительной, но постепенно оказывается тревожной и даже страшной.

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?

TWENTY TRILLION LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA contains 33 full page pen and ink illustrations by acclaimed artist Mahendra Singh, who previously illustrated an edition of THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK.

Mahendra Singh and Adam Roberts have revisited Jules Verne's classic SF novel, and together they have come up with a unique vision.

Интервью, 2018г.. Журнал мир фантастики октябрь 2018г.

Along with a number of his peers, sf writer Konstantin Skvorecky, whose autobiography is this novel, was summoned to a dacha and told by Stalin himself to come up with a plausible alien-attack scenario. Just as suddenly, they were told to leave and forget everything that had happened. Konstantin spent the next years drinking and smoking himself to death, until he became one of the two Russians who don’t drink. In 1986 he encounters Jan, who was also at the dacha and now works for a government ministry. Jan believes that everything they imagined is now coming true, which means they have a pressing need to get to Ukraine. If Jan is right, someone is going to blow it up and must be stopped. Disaster awaits, for Konstantin is blown to bits at Chernobyl. Then his story gets really interesting, and the laws of reality get bent to nearly the breaking point. Roberts conjures the atmosphere of Konstantin’s era perfectly, makes his journey fascinating, and even makes him a pretty likable crotchety old man.

Это и хоррор, и научная фантастика, и любовное письмо Канту. Сказать по правде, это такой идеальный роман для гиков – о природе всего. Ощутимую часть романа два мужика разговаривают о философии, однако делают они это на одинокой станции в Антарктике. И приехали они туда, чтобы попробовать установить контакт с внеземной цивилизацией. Разумеется, вскоре выясняется, что с внеземной цивилизацией установить контакт проще, чем друг с другом – и вот, пока физики ссорятся и пытаются головой объять необъятное, от теории искусственного интеллекта до ноуменов, во льдах за окном что-то начинает шевелиться… Этому роману как раз таки не повезло с тем, что его слишком часто со всем и со всеми сравнивали – от «Улисса» до «Нейроманта», от Томаса де Квинси до Лавкрафта, но здесь как раз тот случай, когда уже стоит заметить, что делает сам Робертс. А он просто-напросто делает страшный-престрашный триллер из разговора за жизнь между двумя нердами. И это круто.

Riddles have lost none of their power over us: we are as fascinated by mysteries, from sudoko to whodunnits, from jokes to philosophical conundrums. The Hobbit is a book threaded through with riddles; most obviously in its central 'Riddles in the Dark' chapter, but everywhere else too—what does 'Good Morning' mean? What is a burrahobbit? How many versions of the Hobbit are there? What is the buried secret in the nine riddles Bilbo and Gollum swap between one another? What are Ents? Dragons? Wizards? What is the magic of the magic ring?

All these questions, and more, are answered in The Riddles of The Hobbit, the first critical engagement with Tolkien's great novel to take 'the riddle' seriously as a key structuring principle of the novel. Riddles are more than a diverting pastime; they are expressive and beguiling rebuses that touch on larger mysteries, powerful questions and paradoxes also embodied in the Catholicism that informed so much of Tolkien's imaginative life. Ringing widely across Tolkien's creative life, The Riddles of The Hobbit explores the importance of riddles to the Anglo Saxon and Norse cultures that inspired him, and discusses scores of riddles offering (usually) more than one answer for each. This is a critical study of the playful aspect of a great writer that takes his playfulness seriously; it explores and embodies ingenuity; and comes to some original and—on occasion—startling new conclusions.

Two narrators tell the story of the simmering tensions between their two communities as they travel out to a new planet, colonise it, then destroy themselves when the tensions turn into outright war. Adam Roberts is a new writer completely in command of the SF genre. This is a novel that is at once entertaining and philosophical. The attitudes and prejudices of its characters are subtlety drawn and ring completely true despite the alien circumstances they find themselves in. The grasp of science and its impact on people is instinctive. But above all it is the epic and colourful world building that marks SALT out - the planet Salt rivals Dune in its desolation and is a suitably biblical setting for a novel that is powered by the corrupting influence of imperfectly remembered religions on distant societies. From the early scenes set on a colony ship towed by a massive ice meteorite, to the description of a planet covered in sodium chloride, to the chilling narrative of a world sliding into its first war, this is a novel from a writer who shouts star quality.

Marley was dead. Again.

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?

Was Tiny Tim's illness something infinitely more sinister than mere rickets and consumption? Can Scrooge be persuaded to go back to his evil ways, travel back to Christmas past and destroy the brain stem of the tiny, irritatingly cheery Patient Zero?

It's the Dickensian Zombie Apocalypse - God Bless us, one and all!

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.

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.

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.

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.