Splinter

(Probably 3.5 stars, but those 1 star reviews need a counterweight!) As a teenager, I read and enjoyed Jules Verne's obscure novel To the Sun/Off on a Comet. (The translation I read was divided into two volumes.) I sort of thought no one else had ever read it, but of course some other people had. One of those people is Adam Roberts. And now Roberts has produced this curious riff on Verne's original novel. The story is told in three sections. Rather cutely (though I must say the conceit works pretty well) they are in past tense, present tense, and future tense. The protagonist comes home from France to California to visit his father, with whom he has not been on good terms. Hector Jr. is an art historian. His father is a rich man, and his mother died some decades earlier. He finds that his father has holed up at his ranch in rural California. He is convinced that he is in contact with an intelligent space being, in the form of an asteroid of sorts that is going to collide with the Earth and send part of it on a journey around the Sun. Just like in the Verne novel. Hector Sr. has gathered a small group of, well, call them cultists, prepared to survive this impact and reestablish the human race. And when is the impact scheduled? This very night! The rest of the novel, then, follows events at the ranch as something that seems very much like what Hector's father predicted actually occurs. Or maybe. There is an earthquake, after which the ranch seems isolated, fogged in, and surrounded by gravitational anomalies best explained by a massive object being buried beneath it. But Hector remains quite stubbornly skeptical. He is more concerned with his lust for one of the women at the ranch, whom he decides is sleeping with his father. He is also of course concerned with his strained relationship with his father. And he's pretty worried when he starts to get visions that at least to an extent resemble the visions his father claims to be having. Finally, in the third section, things get very weird indeed, with a movement towards an SFnally transcendent resolution. It's an odd, original novel. At one level it is at least a brave try at making the absurd events depicted in Verne's novel almost plausible. But more seriously, it is a character study. Hector Jr. is clearly a man who has not escaped his father's shadow. His relationships with women are adolescent. Even his career seems based on essentially sophomoric attitudes toward art. As Roberts suggests in his afterword, he (as with all of us) needs to resolve his relationship with his father to truly grow up. That Hector needs to survive the end of the world to grow up is, I suppose, a rather science-fictional result. This is rather an impressive novel, but not quite one I could love. It's well-imagined, and well-written. The main character is thoroughly believable. Only, he's not terribly interesting, and not terribly nice, without being in any sense evil. All of this makes sense, and this works quite w

Adam Roberts is a brilliant writer - at least that's been my opinion since I read his second novel, ON, about a world that was one enormous and seemingly infinite cliff. Each of his novels is a different Big Idea writ large. The story of SPLINTER is no exception. It was inspired by the Jules Verne tale OFF ON A COMET. Roberts did his own translation from the French, correcting many errors and omissions of the previous translation. The new text is available online as a download here: http://www.solarisbooks.com/downloads.asp Highly recommended.