What the author says - Adam Roberts

The most excellent Adam Roberts, one of the most erudite of the contemporary Brit SF writers, is the latest author to add some of his personal insights into his works in the What The Author Says feature on our SF&F book pages. Not content with giving readers a fascinating insight into The Snow, the forthcoming Gradisil and the mammoth History of Science Fiction Adam very kindly agreed to expand on his thoughts on his eagerly anticipated new novel, Gradisil, which I can't wait to get my little literary hands on:

"With Gradisil I wanted to find a way in which ordinary people could start to colonise space under their own steam. Up until now, after all, getting into orbit has been so ruinously expensive that only national governments (and latterly very wealthy corporations) have been able to manage it. You can’t extrapolate colonisation from that premise: it’d be as if getting across the Atlantic to America in the 19^th century had cost so much that only European Governments and the Rothschilds could afford to send settlers—and they’d be a select group of ex-military team-thinkers who’d execute government orders and then sail home after a couple of months. Under those circumstances there would never have been an America. Or, of course, there would be an America but it wouldn’t consist of white settlers; no George Bush; no Britney Spears …actually, that starts to sound pretty appealing.

But I’m getting distracted.

The problem is that rockets are expensive. No way round that. So I needed a plausible means of getting into orbit that didn’t involve rockets. I imagined a technology you could fit to any regular jet-plane or private flier that used resistance to the Earth’s magnetic field to ‘fly’ into orbit. When I ran the idea past Stephen Baxter he did not say that it was not without the possibility of never working in real life. At all. I took this to be a ringing endorsement.

From that premise the whole story grew like a wide-arching tree. The capacious spaces of Earth orbit, known to its inhabitants as ‘the uplands’, fill up over several decades with pioneers, idealists, criminals on the run and various sorts. This new country is out of the jurisdiction of ground-based nations. Naturally the world superpower of the end of the 21^st century (America, in this novel) wants to change that. Naturally war follows.

The novel is based around three generations of one family, whose destiny is caught up with the rapidly expanding population of the uplands; and who are involved in the War of Independence that ensues. I wanted to write a set of interlocking stories in around the metaphor of the ‘tree’: family trees; the ‘world tree’ Yggdrasil (the lines of magnetic force flowing from the Earth’s poles, like a willow) from a garbled version of which the book gets its title; the way great oaks can grow from small seeds; and perhaps most of all: what happens to trees in the largest of storms—do they sway, or do they break? You’ll have to read the novel to find out what happens to my fledging republic …"