As would be expected from a highly educated author who has studied the classics and currently teaches literature,
SPLINTER has it's share of references to art history and Shakespeare along side modern pop culture references, giving the novel an enjoyably light hearted ‘life imitates art’ feel, although this is not a light-hearted story. It helped me relate to Hector when he made reference to events and personages that I am familiar with, and I laughed too... Roberts fleshes out his characters with all the raw emotions: jealousy, hate, shame, want, and fear. The things that deep down, on that animal level, make us human. SPLINTER is very smart, very subtle. Roberts starts the narrative in past tense, segues into present tense, and by the end has transitioned in future tense — unusual and unexpected way to keep the story interesting, and the reader guessing... I didn't know it until I read Robert's afterword, but Splinter is a clever homage to ‘Off on a Comet’ by Jules Verne. I'm sure I missed out on plenty of classical literature references, but I still very much enjoyed Splinter, and now I'm interested in reading some Jules Verne as well!-- SFRevu
Science-fiction literature is a real minefield. Properly executed, it can soar to amazing new heights in imagination., while also offering a welcome insight to the way way we live today... More often than not, though, little other than a fairly intriguing concept is offered and then the remainder of the narrative is allowed to write itself... Splinter by Adam Roberts, on the other hand, makes no such mistakes. The tale is about Hector, a man who is stuck on the last fragment of the Earth with the members of a bizarre cult after an asteroid pulverises the planet... Roberts effectively uses the band of survivors as as a microcosm to dissect human relations, from the smallest gestures to the broadest of traits.
-- SciFi Now
Splinter is a reimagining of a little-known Jules Verne novel, Off on a Comet. Stylistically, the first part of Splinter calls de Lillo and Auster to mind. The writing is crisp, incisive and assured... full marks to Roberts for not playing it safe. On the whole, devotees of literary sf will find much to love here, from the adroit exploration of themes to the unabashed ingenuity of form.
-- Peter Loftus, Interzone #212
The survivor of a global catastrophe has to come to terms with a very different outlook on life… A major part of the story is about his growing up, and realising that the world does not revolve around him – even the smaller splinter of the planet on which he finds himself when some terrible event splits Earth into numerous planetoids which miraculously manage to maintain an atmosphere. Roberts very effectively takes you inside Sevradac’s head, complete with its Freudian slips, loosely remembered pieces of jingles and nursery rhymes and total self-absorption... It’s also an examination of the benefits of being part of a community rather than standing out as an individual, and the trauma when you realise that you have become the ‘adult’ part of a family relationship. We only see the others around Sevradac through his eyes, but can sense their desire to include him until he pushes them away once too often - only eventually to find something that will accept him no matter what... Stylistically Splinter is an unusual novel, with its three sections written in past, present and future tenses respectively, and it's one that stays with you long after you’ve finished it.
-- DreamWatch SciFi
I found Splinter to be a very clever and thought-provoking tale as it follows the group trying to survive following the destruction of the planet. Robert's characterisation and writing is masterful. The tale is delivered through the eyes of a very sceptical Hector, and the story shines in the telling. Splinter is at times humorous, at times provocative and even philosophical, but it's never dull as everything is grounded by Hector's humanity… I found Splinter to be a very good read, and I finished the book in a day. It's a credit to Robert's skill that he's able to tell what at first hand appears to be a far-fetched tale in such a convincing manner. I for one, have been converted into a fan.
-- James R.Cain
Splinter [is] one of the most beautifully written and sensitively themed novels I've read all year... What makes Splinter different is that Roberts writes much warmer, more rhythmic prose; not less mindful, since his writing is always heavily controlled, but more fertile. Lush, even... Splinter conveys the fecund landscape and frustrated eroticism of the end of the world through its sensual immediacy. It would be easy, having read only certain of his novels, to condemn Roberts as a frosty and frigid writer, but this is hardly possible in light of Splinter, in which he is all fluidity and fire... The ubiquitous "what if?" is Roberts's narrative touchstone, the essential foundation to which all of his fiction, whatever its style, returns again and again... Roberts uses it in a fundamentally different way to many of his contemporaries. In Roberts's novels the "what if" functions as the first cause, the key to the whole world of his fiction — it is the primary life giver, the ignition. Thus, I think it is what we might call the narrative theology of Roberts's work that makes it so exciting, no matter the dressing. It is his complicated pursuit of simple ideas that makes him one of our genre's most accomplished writers.
-- Victoria Hoyle, Strange Horizons
In 1877 Jules Verne published Off on a Comet, in which a meteor strikes Earth and knocks off a chunk of northern Africa inhabited by a cast of characters who whizz around the solar system before arriving, improbably, back on Earth. Roberts recapitulates the earlier novel, but updates and subverts it, having a wedge of present day California fly off into space with a complement of cult members. While Verne was primarily concerned with telling an adventure story, Splinter is an acute psychological analysis of Hector Servadac Junior, a distant relation of the original novel's protagonist. He's a complex character, obsessed with sex and fixed in a permanent adolescent state due to being unable to break away from domination by his father, an overbearing guru-figure. This is a clever thought-experiment from a writer gaining a reputation for producing a string of wholly original novels.
-- Eric Brown, The Guardian
Adam Roberts has a gift for creating unlikeable protagonists: you want to thump the poet at the centre of Land of the Headless, and Hector Sevradac Jnr, the focal point of Splinter, is cut from similar cloth.
A major part of the story is about his growing up, and realising that the world does not revolve around him – even the smaller splinter of the planet on which he finds himself when some terrible event splits Earth into numerous planetoids which miraculously manage to maintain an atmosphere. Roberts very effectively takes you inside Sevradac’s head, complete with its Freudian slips, loosely remembered pieces of jingles and nursery rhymes and total self-absorption.
The tale itself, as the author recounts in a lengthy afterword, is inspired by one of Jules Verne’s lesser known works, although Roberts takes the concept far further into the realms of hard SF than his 19th Century predecessor.
It’s also an examination of the benefits of being part of a community rather than standing out as an individual, and the trauma when you realise that you have become the ‘adult’ part of a family relationship. We only see the others around Sevradac through his eyes, but can sense their desire to include him until he pushes them away once too often - only eventually to find something that will accept him no matter what.
-- Dreamwatch
I've been championing the work of Adam Roberts since the appearance in 2000 of his first novel, Salt. He's a bold, meticulous, exciting U.K. writer with affinities to everyone from Stephen Baxter to Iain Banks, from Paul Park to Alistair Reynolds, from John Crowley to Thomas Disch. He blends literary excellence with strong speculative punch. But the U.S. audience has been deprived of his work until very recently, as his books inexplicably could not seem to secure publication here. Hopefully, with the arrival of... this current book, Roberts is on his way to becoming a household word in America.
Splinter, like the Verne novel that inspired it, is a bit laterally displaced from the Roberts canon. For one thing, it takes place in the present, whereas most books from Roberts inhabit a distant future. It also takes place on Earth, unlike the majority of his others. It's less recomplicated and dense, a tad cloistered. And finally, Roberts has adapted his style somewhat, choosing, as he says in a fascinating postscript essay on the origins of this novel, to emulate "Updike and Roth and DeLillo." (I myself hear existential and domestic echoes of Edward Albee and Samuel Beckett.) But despite all those somewhat diminishing differences from Roberts' usual scope, the book does share with his other work a large central conceit vigorously plumbed for shattering emotional effects. As in some early Ballard catastrophe, inner and outer geographies become merged and productively confused. A delicious sense of uncertainty about the nature of reality pervades the text.
Grade: A-
-- SciFi.com
