Jack Glass The Story Of A Murderer

Ever since his first novel, Salt (2000), Adam Roberts has established himself as one of the most prolific, challenging, and popular novelists writing in science fiction today. His work often contains distorted references to earlier fictions, and that is particularly the case with Jack Glass, which won both the BSFA Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. It's a daring attempt to combine golden age science fiction with golden age crime fiction, a combination that really shouldn't work, but does. The novel is in three parts: in the first, notorious interstellar criminal Jack Glass is confined to a prison asteroid, and has to escape from an escape-proof gaol. In the second part, there is a classic murder mystery in which the likely suspects are in a gravity well where they couldn't even lift the murder weapon. Finally there is a variation on a locked room mystery set aboard a space habitat. Why it's on the list: The great appeal of science fiction has always been its intellectual engagement, and that is certainly the case with Adam Roberts's fiction. This combination of crime and sf produces a hybrid that keeps you guessing.