{"id":132,"date":"2008-07-19T15:56:42","date_gmt":"2008-07-19T19:56:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cloggie.org\/books\/?p=132"},"modified":"2008-09-30T15:59:15","modified_gmt":"2008-09-30T19:59:15","slug":"swiftly-adam-roberts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/2008\/07\/swiftly-adam-roberts\/","title":{"rendered":"Swiftly — Adam Roberts"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Cover<\/p>\n


\nSwiftly
\nAdam Roberts
\n359 pages
\npublished in 2008
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

\nI’m not a great fan of Adam Roberts, as my reviews of his first two novels, Salt<\/cite><\/a> and On<\/a><\/cite>, as well as his first book on science fiction<\/a> show. He has a style of writing that is too flat and detached for my liking, a penchant for using unlikeable characters as his protagonists, some difficulty in creating a good story and a view of science fiction I don’t share. In both Salt<\/cite> and On<\/cite> Roberts had created interesting settings, but fell down on providing the characters and story to do justice to them.\n<\/p>\n

\nSwiftly<\/cite>, not to be confused with his earlier collection of short stories also called Swiftly<\/cite>, is Adam Roberts’ latest novel, a continuation of Jonathan Swift’s classic proto-science fiction novel, Gulliver’s Travels<\/cite>. Roberts takes Swift’s satire on early eigthteen
\ncentury Britain and Europe and imagines what could’ve happened if Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa and the Houyhnhnms were real, what the world could’ve looked like almost one and a half centuries later, in 1848. Now there are huge armies of Liliputians (or rather the more reliable Blefuscudians) working in England’s industries, bought and sold as so many animals. The Houyhnhnms have been enlisted as His Majesty’s Sapient Cavalry, while the Royal Navy has killed most of the Brobdingnagians as a menace to the British Empire. There’s another war with France going on, one England is winning handily, laying siege to Versailles.\n<\/p>\n

\nRead more<\/a>…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Swiftly Adam Roberts 359 pages published in 2008 I’m not a great fan of Adam Roberts, as my reviews of his first two novels, Salt and On, as well as his first book on science fiction show. He has a style of writing that is too flat and detached for my liking, a penchant for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[48,845,47],"class_list":["post-132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-fiction","tag-adam-roberts","tag-science-fiction","tag-swiftly"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":133,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions\/133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/books2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}