By Gollancz author Adam Roberts
Yellow Blue Tibia is published now in hardback.
There are few genre joys to compare with the news that you've been shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award. It remains SF's premier award, and if it's an honour to be nominated it's an even greater honour to be nominated this year, and be listed alongside novels of the extraordinary skill and power of the other nominees. Obviously I'd rather win, but if I lose to a book the calibre of Gwyneth Jones's superb, spacious, wonderful Spirit, or China Mièville's potent, original The City and The City, or Stan Robinson's masterful Galileo's Dream, then I’ll feel neither bitterness nor shame. I still sit at home pondering my chances of winning, of course. I’m only human. But the Clarke judges enjoy a reputation for canny inscrutability, and second guessing their ruminations is a fool’s business.
My novel, Yellow Blue Tibia, is a black comedy set in Soviet Russia and the Ukraine in 1986. Back in 1945 a group of Russian SF writers were given the task, by Stalin himself, of concocting a story of alien invasion as a way of unifying the people of the world. Stalin changes his mind and ices the project; but forty years later the fictional plan they dreamed up is coming true in the world. It’s a novel about science fiction’s love for imagining new worlds (something the genre shares, of course, with Communism) and also for explosively blasting those worlds to pieces. It’s also a novel about alternate realities that sees in that venerable science fiction trope an explanation for the peculiarly improbable workings of the Spy Adventure Hairs-breadth-escape Action idiom, like Bond or Bourne. I tell a spy versus spy, chase, fist- and gunfight, big explosion sort of story; but I do so in a deliberately flattened, worn-down, arse-over-tip manner, mucking about with the expectations of that narrow genre as far as I was able. One of the serious aims of the book, ludicrously or ironically addressed, is: why do so many people believe in UFOs and alien abduction when, patently, neither thing is actually true? Yellow Blue Tibia advances a theory about that. And above all, the world of this novel is a funny old world, in both its ha-ha and its peculiar iterations. And I know funny. I’m a clown fish.
I could be wrong, but my sense is that, like the Academy Awards, the Clarkes don’t tend to reward comedy—a Gandhi or a Godfather has more chance of an Oscar than a Monty Python flic, after all. What’s more (and this might be another strike against the novel’s chances of winning) not everybody shares my sense of humour. I don’t, for instance, see comedy and seriousness as opposites. On the contrary, it seems to me that some modes of humour—irony, say—are actually the only way of getting at the truth of many serious things. In Yellow Blue Tibia I tried to work not only with the more conventional forms of Funny (for instance, with testicular knockabout comedy), but also with more idiosyncratic versions of ironic ludicrousness, of both action and concept. Indeed, quite a lot of its comedy is of the deeply serious sort that might be mistaken for Not Funny by the less acute. Not everybody will get it, or like it. I’m delighted the Clarke judges got it, and liked it, enough to shortlist it; but I appreciate that’s not to say it’ll carry the palm, especially against such strong opposition. It is an honour to be nominated.
Hmm. Having typed that phrase testicular knockabout comedy, I rather wish I hadn’t. It fair brings tears to the eyes to think about it.
Lenin once, famously, defined Communism as ''Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country." This, in a nutshell, and suitably adapted, is what I was trying for in Yellow Blue Tibia: Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole genre. And by ‘electrification’ I mean either a whole exploding nuclear power station’s worth of zoom, or else I mean one of those little electrically-powered buzzers you secrete in your palm before you shake somebody else’s hand. One of the two, certainly.
