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Roberts, Keith

Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author, Artist.

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(1935-2000) UK author and illustrator long resident in the south of England, where most of his best fiction was set. After working as an illustrator and cartoon animator, he began publishing sf with "Anita" and "Escapism" in the same issue ofScience Fantasy, September/October 1964; several of his early stories were written as by Alistair Bevan. He served as associate editor ofScience Fantasy 1965-1966 and edited its successorSF Impulse for the whole of its run (March 1966-February 1967). His first novel,The Furies (July-September 1965Science Fantasy;1966), is the most orthodoxly structured and told of all his work, sf or otherwise, most of his later novels being fixups told from a brooding, slantwise, intensely visual point of view.The Furies is a traditional tale in the mode of the UKDisaster, in which a nuclear test goes awry, inspiring an onslaught of space-spawned giant wasps which ravage England and come close to eliminating mankind. Beyond a certain sultriness of tone, it could have been written by any of a dozen UK specialists in theCosy Catastrophe.

With his second book, Roberts came fully into his own as a writer.Pavane (stories March-July 1966Impulse; coll of linked stories1968; rev with "The White Boat" [December 1966New Worlds] added1969) superbly depicts anAlternate History in which – Elizabeth I having been assassinated, the Spanish Armada victorious and no Protestant rise of capitalism in the offing – a technologically backward England survives under the sway of the Catholic Church Militant. The individual stories are moody, eloquent, elegiac and thoroughly convincing.The Inner Wheel (coll of linked stories1970) deals with the kind of gestaltSuperman-cum-Telepathy theme made familiar by TheodoreSturgeon'sMore Than Human (fixup1953) and is similarly powerful, though tending to a rather uneasy sentimentality, perhaps endemic to tales of such relationships but also typical of Roberts's handling of children and women.Anita (coll of linked stories1970; exp1990) is fantasy; the stories had appeared much earlier inScience Fantasy.The Boat of Fate (1971), an historical novel with a Roman setting, shares a painterly concern for primitive landscapes withThe Chalk Giants (coll of linked stories1974; cut1975), whose separate tales elegantly embody a cyclical vision of the future of the island of Britain. The protagonist of the framing narrative (seen in the UK edition only) drives to the south coast to escape an indistinctDisaster, goes into hiding, and (depending on one's reading) either cycles the rest of the book through his head or can be seen as himself emblematic of the movement the tales portend, fromPost-Holocaust chaos through God-riddenRuined Earth savagery back to a state premonitory of his own wounded condition.

Roberts's early short stories were assembled inMachines and Men: Science Fiction Stories (coll1973) andThe Grain Kings (coll1976), both being excerpted inThe Passing of the Dragons (coll1977). The title story of the second volume fascinatingly describes life on giant hotel-like grain harvesters in a world of vast farms; in the same volume, "Weihnachtsabend" (inNew Worlds Quarterly 4, anth1972, ed MichaelMoorcock), perhaps Roberts's most radical single story, hallucinatedly depicts anAlternate History in which the Nazis have wonWorld War Two (seeHitler Wins), and expands upon the cheap manufacturedDecadent paganism of the victors; the tale climaxes in a corrupt Wild Hunt whose prey is a woman. Later work was assembled inLadies from Hell (coll1979),The Lordly Ones (coll1986) andWinterwood and Other Hauntings (coll1989), the limited edition of which also contained, bound-in,The Event (1989 chap). As in his later novels, these stories increasingly display an entangled – though sometimes searching – dis-ease with human nature and sexuality, with the course of history and with the fate of the UK.

Roberts's first novel after a gap of some years wasMolly Zero (1980), in which the classic sf tale of the growth of an adolescent is – typically for Roberts – subverted by a sense that theDystopian world into which the young female protagonist enters – an oppressive class-ridden demoralized Little England whose inhabitants are barred from the sea by metal fences – is dismayingly corrosive. It is a sense which variously though unspecifically serves as background for the shadowy escapades of the eponymous heroine in theKaeti sequence comprisingKaeti & Company (coll of linked stories1986),Kaeti's Apocalypse (1986 chap) andKaeti on Tour (coll1992); and the life of the hauntingfemme fatale depicted inGráinne (1987). In the sullen quietism that underlies the tales told, these books have little of the feel of sf. Much more sf-like is theKiteworld sequence – comprisingKiteworld (fixup1985), the uncollected novella "Tremarest" (November 1986Amazing) and the serial "Drek Yarman" (February-June 2000Spectrum SF) – which invokes the atmosphere of earlier work in its depiction of aRuined Earth Britain dominated by religious fanatics, and itsSteampunk rendering of the life of the crews who man the Kiteships, which are the size ofAirships, to guard the frontiers against "demons" (as the ballistic or cruise missiles of a former technological era are now remembered) in a kind ofParody of thePax Aeronautica theme. The life of the eponymous protagonist of the book-length "Drek Yarman" re-enacts in small the deterioration of a land torn to bits byReligion, with marriage and maturity decaying inexorably (seeEntropy) into despair.

As an illustrator, Roberts did much to change the appearance of UK sf magazines, notablyScience Fantasy, for which he designed all but seven of the covers from January 1965 until its demise (asSF Impulse) in February 1967, and alsoNew Worlds for a period in 1966. His boldly Expressionist covers, line-oriented, paralleled the shift in content of these magazines away fromGenre SF andFantasy towards a more free-form, speculative kind of fiction. He later did covers and interior illustrations for the book editions ofNew Worlds Quarterly edited by MichaelMoorcock, for some of whose novels he designed covers. He also illustrated several of his own 1980s titles, and published three works of nonfiction:The Natural History of the P.H. (1988 chap), the initials referring to the "Primitive Heroine" who appears throughout Roberts's work, a figure men may treat as alamia but who is in truth a figure of charismatic, self-reliant integrity;Irish Encounters: A Short Travel (dated 1988 but1989 chap); andLemady: Episodes of a Writer's Life (1997), an uneasy memoir. [JC]

see also:Androids;BSFA Award;Cybernetics;Hive Minds;Interzone;New Writings in SF;Sociology;Supernatural Creatures.

Keith John Kingston Roberts

born Kettering, Northamptonshire: 20 September 1935

died Salisbury, Wiltshire: 5 October 2000

works

series

Kaeti

  • Kaeti & Company (Worcester Park, Surrey: Kerosina Books,1986) [coll of linked stories:Kaeti: hb/Keith Roberts]
  • Kaeti's Apocalypse (Worcester Park, Surrey: Kerosina Books,1986) [story: chap: cover only gives a subtitle, "Kaeti Eleven":Kaeti: pb/Keith Roberts]
  • Kaeti on Tour (Feltham, Middlesex: The Sirius Book Company,1992) [coll of linked stories:Kaeti: hb/JimBurns]

Kiteworld

  • Kiteworld (London: Victor Gollancz,1985) [fixup:Kiteworld: hb/nonpictorial]
  • "Drek Yarman" (February-June 2000Spectrum SF) [not published in book form:Kiteworld: mag/]

individual titles

novels and collections of linked stories

  • The Furies (New York: Berkley Books,1966) [July-September 1965Science Fantasy: pb/PaulLehr]
  • Pavane (London: Rupert Hart-Davies,1968) [coll of linked stories: first appeared March-July 1966Impulse (seeScience Fantasy): hb/Keith Roberts]
    • Pavane (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company,1969) [coll of linked stories: exp of the above: "The White Boat" (December 1966New Worlds) added: hb/Pat Stier]
  • The Inner Wheel (London: Rupert Hart-Davies,1970) [coll of linked stories: hb/Keith Roberts]
  • Anita (New York: Ace Books,1970) [coll of linked stories: September/October 1964-December 1970 var mags plus new work: pb/George Ziel]
    • Anita (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania: Owlswick Press,1990) [coll of linked stories: exp of the above, adding "The Checkout" (February 1981F&SF): hb/Stephen EFabian]
  • The Boat of Fate (London: Hutchinson,1971) [hb/BillBotten]
  • The Chalk Giants (London: Hutchinson,1974) [coll of linked stories: hb/Colin Andrews]
    • The Chalk Giants (New York: G B Putnam's,1975) [coll of linked stories: cut version of the above: all continuity framing has been cut: hb/RichardPowers]
  • Molly Zero (London: Victor Gollancz,1980) [hb/nonpictorial]
  • Gráinne (Worcester Park, Surrey: Kerosina Books,1987) [illus/hb/Keith Roberts]
  • The Road to Paradise (Worcester Park, Surrey: Kerosina Books,1989) [book is dated 1988 but published 1989: illus/hb/Keith Roberts]

collections and stories

nonfiction

about the author

links

previous versions of this entry



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