- Paperback: 224 pages
- Publisher: Solaris (3 Sep 2007)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 184416490X
- ISBN-13: 978-1844164905
- Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 15.5 x 1.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 271,677 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
"Splinter" is a thought-provoking science fiction novel about faith, disaster and alien intelligence by one of the new masters of the genre. When Hector discovers his estranged father has channelled the family fortune into a bizarre doomsday cult who await the imminent destruction of the Earth, he is wracked by feelings of betrayal and doubt. Things change, however, the night an asteroid plummets from space and destroys the planet, leaving Hector and a handful of survivors struggling for survival on a splinter of the Earth. Trapped amongst the surviving cultists, Hector must confront his own fears and doubts to help rebuild both the human race and his relationship with his father. This is a vibrant homage to a classic Jules Verne novel from a multiple Arthur C Clarke Award nominee.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
About the Author
Adam Roberts is the author of seven acclaimed science fiction novels, along with numerous bestselling parodies. He is Senior Reader in English at London University.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
"A voyage extraordinaire from the king of high concept sci-fi" - not quite. The theme is a homage to a little known Jules Verne classic "Off on a comet". In Splinter, the protagonist's father believes the Verne book to have been a portent of a real and imminent disaster that will shatter the Earth into pieces, and has gathered a group of followers in a remote ranch in hope of surviving the cataclysm. The story follows the estranged son coping with his father's beliefs and challenging his own once the impossible happens.
From such a great and implausible concept there is a lot of interesting sci-fi to explore, but the author never really gets stuck into the challenge and there is no great revelations about the supposed intelligent mass that shatters our planet past some overheard discussion between minor characters.
This is 90% a story about the emotional angst the protagonist has about living with his father and his followers, and plenty of pages about his sexual frustrations. Through the course of the book I found I disliked Hector, the main character, increasingly and grew to hate his ambivalence towards the incredible events that have unfolded around him. Some of the minor characters are much more interested in the science and as a sci-fi fan I longed to hear more about them, rather than reading another flashback about lost loves or falling off bicycles as a child.
You would expect from the cover and synopsis to be in for a good modern science based ride around an old Verne concept, but in this respect sci-fi fans will be disappointed by the perhaps poorly described "king of high-concept sci-fi", since this book fails to scratch that itch.
The final 30-ish pages feature an essay by the author about his writing methods and seems a self indulgent and pretentious addition that would have been better replaced by a solid ending.
On the plus side, the book cover is extremely beautiful and the pictures don't do it justice - it is embossed in gold featuring a wonderful victorian style illustration of the post-cataclysm solar system.
Unfortunately I'd only recommend the book to very light sci-fi fans who are interested in the emotional and "human" aspect of the genre. Harder sci-fi fans, and even curious fans of Verne, should be more cautious.
From such a great and implausible concept there is a lot of interesting sci-fi to explore, but the author never really gets stuck into the challenge and there is no great revelations about the supposed intelligent mass that shatters our planet past some overheard discussion between minor characters.
This is 90% a story about the emotional angst the protagonist has about living with his father and his followers, and plenty of pages about his sexual frustrations. Through the course of the book I found I disliked Hector, the main character, increasingly and grew to hate his ambivalence towards the incredible events that have unfolded around him. Some of the minor characters are much more interested in the science and as a sci-fi fan I longed to hear more about them, rather than reading another flashback about lost loves or falling off bicycles as a child.
You would expect from the cover and synopsis to be in for a good modern science based ride around an old Verne concept, but in this respect sci-fi fans will be disappointed by the perhaps poorly described "king of high-concept sci-fi", since this book fails to scratch that itch.
The final 30-ish pages feature an essay by the author about his writing methods and seems a self indulgent and pretentious addition that would have been better replaced by a solid ending.
On the plus side, the book cover is extremely beautiful and the pictures don't do it justice - it is embossed in gold featuring a wonderful victorian style illustration of the post-cataclysm solar system.
Unfortunately I'd only recommend the book to very light sci-fi fans who are interested in the emotional and "human" aspect of the genre. Harder sci-fi fans, and even curious fans of Verne, should be more cautious.
Format:Paperback
Adam Roberts ideas are always bizarre but they have - up til now - had a plausible and very entertaining internal logic. 'Splinter' is totally implausible and the basic idea is so little explored or explained that it finishes up as plain silly. Usually, his characters are engaging and believable but in this book they are unpleasant so you don't care what happens to them - I don't know why I finished reading it!
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
9 reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Odd, original, but distant riff on Jules Verne
28 Feb 2008
Format:Paperback
(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 well in working out the novel's themes. Yet it held me at a distance from the book -- and left me respecting Roberts's achievement, but no more.
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 well in working out the novel's themes. Yet it held me at a distance from the book -- and left me respecting Roberts's achievement, but no more.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Adam Roberts is a Speculative Master
22 Sep 2007
Format:Paperback
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.
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.
Tedious, uninteresting, totally unlikable main character
13 Nov 2011
Format:Paperback
This book is SO hard to get into. The main character is totally unlikeable. It doesn't help that he's a walking dick (acts like one plus every woman he sees he's wondering how to get into her pants and talks about how badly he needs to get laid). My husband gave up before the end of chapter one but I dragged myself through it.
The last chapter or so is written in the future tense which is a weird and seemingly meaningless choice. The ending was unsatisfying. All in all it read like a book you have to read for class (and this is coming from someone who majored in English and loved most of the books she read for class). Maybe it would be more interesting if I was reading it for class, then we would be discussing and analyzing it. But it is not an enjoyable sci-fi read and I wouldn't recommend it.
The last chapter or so is written in the future tense which is a weird and seemingly meaningless choice. The ending was unsatisfying. All in all it read like a book you have to read for class (and this is coming from someone who majored in English and loved most of the books she read for class). Maybe it would be more interesting if I was reading it for class, then we would be discussing and analyzing it. But it is not an enjoyable sci-fi read and I wouldn't recommend it.
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