The Soddit

THE SELLAMILLION is NOT a parody of Tolkien's THE SILMARILLION. That would be pointless because although all Tolkien fans have a copy, only three of them have read past page 40.It is, however, a parody of all that Tolkien created as he worked on LORD OF THE RINGS. The history of the elderly days. Early missing drafts of LORD OF THE RINGS. A correspondence between the author and publisher on whether it should be a Bellybutton Stud of Doom rather than a Ring of Power. An experimental version of LOTR as if written by Dr Seuss.That sort of thing. It'll be funny. Possibly hilarious. The author's told us it will be. Promised even. And he did write THE SODDIT. And that was quite funny.

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!

Sprung from a prison in the centre of a star, the universe's last criminal is employed to kill the population of a planet. It is a crime that will tear apart an interstellar utopia. Keeping ahead of detection and preparing the crime, the killer voyages to numerous worlds and hones the instincts required for murder. And wonders who is behind the contract.Roberts' new novel is an extraordinary fusing of ideas, exotic locations, personal drama and an enquiry into the nature of crime in a society that thinks it has forgotten how to commit it.

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 women 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.

Tighe lives on the wall. It towers above his village and falls away below it. It is vast and unforgiving and it is everything he knows. Life is hard on the wall, little more than a clinging on for dear life. And then one day Tighe falls off the wall. And falls, and falls, and falls . . .Lavishly praised everywhere from Asimov's magazine to Interzone, ON is proof positive that Adam Roberts is a new author whose potential for greatness is rapidly being realised.ON is at once a vertiginous concept novel, a coming of age saga, a picaresque journey across a changed world and an epic adventure in the very best traditions of SF.

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.