It was doubly sad to hear that the fine SF novelist Keith Roberts had died from bronchitis and pneumonia on October 5, 2000, a few weeks after his 65th birthday in September. His best-loved novel Pavane, unavailable for some years, was rescheduled for reissue as a Millennium SF Masterworks classic in November--just too late.
Roberts was a uniquely English fiction-writer whose work repeatedly celebrated the geography, legend and poetry of southern England--Thomas Hardy's Wessex brought vividly to life. He did much of his best work in short story form: even the famous Pavane (1968) is assembled from shorter pieces into a magical whole that glows like a stained glass window. Here is the definitive novel of that alternative history where the Spanish Armada wins and Britain finds itself dominated by the tyrannical, technophobic Church of Rome. In this England's 20th century, great steam engines travel the roads, semaphore networks carry the puppet King's commands, and the heretical rediscovery of electricity leads to rebellion and an unforgettable last stand at the siege of Corfe Castle.
The Chalk Giants
(1974), a remarkable--though less easily approachable--tour of an England gone back to its mythic roots in the wake of some obscure disaster, is similarly a mosaic novel built from stories. So too is Kiteworld
(1985), which, like Pavane
, inflicts a harsh religion on our country in a future era when men fly on great kites to keep watch for incoming Demons of the air--flying menaces which we come to realise are legends based on the missiles that fell in this timeline's World War III. Drek Yarman
, a sequel to Kiteworld
that takes its title from the lead character, is being serialised in the British SF magazine Spectrum
(launched 2000).
Our author's first book was The Furies
(1966), a rather more conventional though well-written disaster story featuring a plague of monster wasps. A later novel of note, Molly Zero
(1980), is unusually told in the second person. "You're shivering inside your coat," it begins, the "you" being the young adolescent Molly who must come to terms (at considerable personal cost) with this gently but firmly controlled 22nd-century England where there's always--always--a wire fence between you and the sea.
Those of his 120-odd short stories not used as the building bricks of novels are collected in several now out-of-print volumes, beginning with linked early fantasies about an irrepressible young witch in Anita (collected 1970). They include many remarkable gems of passionate moral and poetic force. Perhaps the best of them all is the 1972 "Weihnachtsabend", a chilling tale of the British Reich after Hitler's victory, which unforgettably shows how the stink of Nazi neopaganism might seep into and warp even our traditional English Christmas.
Besides being an often brilliant writer of fiction, Keith Roberts was editor of the influential 1960s UK magazines Science Fantasy
and SF Impulse
, and also a gifted illustrator--producing covers for Science Fantasy
and New Worlds
, interiors for Michael Moorcock's New Worlds Quarterly
, and both for his own later books. Indeed he is the only person in history to have won British SF Association Awards for best novel (Gráinne
, 1987), best short fiction (with Kitemaster
, a segment of Kiteworld
, and again with Kaeti and the Hangman
) and also best artist.
Much of his later work appeared from small presses, partly because the major publishers were growing more reluctant to handle story collections and partly (one suspects) because Roberts was that very English figure, the crabby genius who can sometimes be impossible to get on with. Many British reviewers, and no doubt publishers, still wince at the memory of blistering letters from the great man--although a few critics were equally staggered by his unexpected praise and generosity. He perversely came to regard himself as "blacklisted by the Establishment".
Thus the collection Kaeti & Company
--starring young Kaeti, latest incarnation of the mythic "Primitive Heroine" figure who fascinated Roberts all through his writing life--came out from Kerosina Books in 1986, Winterwood and Other Hauntings
from Morrigan in 1989, and Kaeti on Tour
from the Sirius Book Company in 1992. All these are or were British small-press publishers of hardback editions never easily found in High Street bookshops, though well worth seeking out. The autobiographical Lemady
was published in 1997 by the even more fugitive American small press Borgo.
In his final decade, Keith Roberts had reasons to be an angry and bitter man. His 1993 Christmas circular to friends and enemies was a grim document, beginning: "This is to advise you that in effect I died in March 1990, when I was finally diagnosed as suffering from multiple sclerosis". He went on to say that unexplained complications had already led to the amputation of his leg, while increasing hand tremors had destroyed him as an artist, a state of affairs which "will be of interest to the various Important Authors I have offended over the years, mainly by existing". The blackest irony came when rehabilitation workers, with the best intentions in the world, helpfully suggested that this superb writer and former professional illustrator should take a creative writing course, or learn to draw. Suicide, he hinted, was a tempting option.
He hung on, though, however painfully, to be rewarded by the appearance of his quirky autobiography and the serialisation of Drek Yarman
. It's truly a shame that he didn't live to see publication of the Masterworks reissue of Pavane, one of the SF greats that will always come into print again: a stately, unforgettably haunting dance through history that might have been and a vision of England that is eternal.
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