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Adam Roberts
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Publisher | Gollancz | ||
ISBN | 978-057508234 | ||
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Julia
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Synopsis
It is 1848 and the British Empire has grown rich exploiting Lilliputian slaves - the finesse of their working allowing unheard of feats of minature engineering; even Babbage's computing device has been made to work. But now the French have formed a regiment of previously peaceful Brobdingnagian giants and invasion looms. In a world where humanity is both smaller and larger than it once was, love and hate loom large. Mankind discovers itself at the centre of scale. Lilliptians are twelve times smaller than us but there are those twelve times smaller than them, and twelve times smaller again and so on. And the scale of being goes up from Swift's giants also ...Adam Roberts has written both a rip roaring 19th century adventure, a love story and a thought-provoking pre-atomic SF novel about our place in the universe.
Review
Adam Roberts is described on the back cover of his latest book as ‘one of the UK's most critically acclaimed SF writers', and Swiftly is a hugely ambitious work in both scope and length (406 pages).
Although the author's record suggests that it should be classified as SF, it ranges beyond the UFO/Galactic Beings scenario which I personally found one of the less satisfying, if logically necessary, elements of the novel, to intense literary allusions and some intriguing historical counter-factuals.
Starting from the premise that Lemuel Gulliver's adventures actually happened, the story begins 122 years later, in 1848, in a Britain radically different from that of the textbooks. Napoleon, we learn from an aside, has died at an early age. France, post revolutionary but without the Code Napoleon or the legacy of Waterloo, vies with Britain as Top Nation and has invaded, thanks to help from gigantic Brobdingnagian troops. Meanwhile the enslaved Lilliputians, the means of Britain's commercial wealth, are about to strike back against their oppressors of all sizes by the use of germ warfare....
Caught up in this situation, is Abraham Bates, coprophiliac lover, of the scientifically inclined and very beautiful Eleanor Burton? Their adventures form the structure of the novel while allowing for philosophically angled discussion of the effects of size on time and space, and the place of human intimacy within this scheme.
Roberts has conveyed the scatological elements of Dean Swift's works and personality almost too effectively, and perhaps the sheer radical indignation of the eighteenth century writer was lost in transition. But this was a gripping (sometimes a griping) read, leaving me with a range of unanswered but thought provoking questions...How come Britain has ‘King George' on the throne, presumably a Hanoverian because of his name so no Stuart restoration (now that would have been fun and might have appealed to the Dean)...what became of Queen Victoria? Or the Chartists? And I loved the thought that Mr Babbage's Calculating Machine was run by tiny beings secreted inside...Who lurks inside my PC, I wonder?
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