Swiftly - Adam Roberts

It is 1848 and the British Empire has grown rich exploiting Lilliputian slaves - the finesse of their working allowing unheard of feats of minature engineering; even Babbage's computing device has been made to work.

But now the French have formed a regiment of previously peaceful Brobdingnagian giants and invasion looms. In a world where humanity is both smaller and larger than it once was, love and hate loom large.

Mankind discovers itself at the centre of scale. Lilliptians are twelve times smaller than us but there are those twelve times smaller than them, and twelve times smaller again and so on. And the scale of being goes up from Swift's giants also . . .

Adam Roberts has written both a rip roaring 19th century adventure, a love story and a thought-provoking pre-atomic SF novel about our place in the universe.

Adam Roberts is 42 and Professor of Nineteenth Century Literature at Royal Hollaway College, London University. His novels, Salt and Gradisil were shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. He has also published a number of academic works on both 19th century poetry and SF.

Swiftly is a solid, effective work.
STARBURST - Anthony Brown

Another intruiging novel from one of the UK's most important working writers of SF, and one of his best.
DEATHRAY - Guy Hayley

"Roberts is the king of the thought-experiment and this novel begins with a grand conceit. Both a compulsive comedy of manners and a free-wheeling metaphysical riff on the nature of religion, the universe and scale."
THE GUARDIAN - Eric Brown

"This is very much science fiction, not fantasy, in its approach and philosophy. It is also a strange love story, a social history and a book about the horrors of war. Roberts perhaps has the most untrammeled imagination in current British science fiction and here, in the best traditions of the picaresque novel, he lets it roam freely to unforgettable effect."
MORNING STAR - Mat Coward

...there are some very well-thought through ideas on relative scale as the Lilliputians deal with items even smaller than them, and the Brobdingnagians have to face even larger creatures. Roberts also borrows tropes from other masters of the genre to test his characters.
DREAMWATCH - Paul Simpson

This is a novel that does indeed move swiftly.
INTERZONE - Paul Kincaid