Best Selling Books by Adam Roberts

Learn to Barbecue & Grill

"Irregularity is incredible, 'a webwork of reference, inspiration, inference and opposition' which investigates the place of the imagination in an era on the very edge of enlightenment" - Tor.com "There is just so much to appreciate and enjoy.... fourteen individual, impeccably formed, visions of literary minds. I'm pleased to confirm that each and every one them, and the tales they have to tell, are most definitely worthy of your time." - The Eloquent Page "Clever, subversive and just so much fun" - A Fantastical Librarian "One of the best short story anthologies I've ever read, executed with an incredible amount of cleverness. Huge achievement." - Under the Radar --- During the Age of Reason, the world's greatest minds named, measured and catalogued the world around them. They brought order and discipline to the universe. Except where they didn't. Irregularity collects fourteen original stories from extraordinary literary voices, each featuring someone - or something - that refused to obey the dictates of reason: Darwin's other voyage, the secret names of spiders, the assassination of Isaac Newton and an utterly impossible book. --- Contents include: "Fairchild's Folly" by Tiffani Angus "A Game Proposition" by Rose Biggin "A Woman Out of Time" by Kim Curran "The Heart of Aris Kindt" by Richard de Nooy "Footprint" by Archie Black "An Experiment in the Formulae of Thought" by Simon Guerrier "Irregularity" by Nick Harkaway "Circulation" by Roger Luckhurst "The Voyage of the Basset" by Claire North "The Assassination of Isaac Newton by the Coward Robert Boyle" by Adam Roberts "Animalia Paradoxa" by Henrietta Rose-Innes "The Last Escapement" by James Smythe "The Darkness" by M. Suddain "The Spiders of Stockholm" by E. J. Swift Fom John Harrison to Ada Lovelace, Isaac Newton to Emilie du Chatelet, these stories showcase the Age of Reason in a very different light. Irregularity also contains an afterword by Sophie Waring and Richard Dunn, Head of Science and Technology at Royal Museums Greenwich. Irregularity is illustrated by Gary Northfield, inspired by paintings provided by the National Maritime Museum. The cover shows "Resolution," artwork by Howard Hardiman. Irregularity is published to coincide with the Ships, Clocks and Stars exhibition at the Royal Maritime Museum, part of Longitude Season - a celebration of the 300th anniversary of the Longitude Act.

Science fiction was being written throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but it underwent a rapid expansion of cultural dissemination and popularity at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. This Element explores the ways this explosion in interest in 'scientific romance', that informs today's global science fiction culture, manifests the specific historical exigences of the revolutions in publishing and distribution technology. H. G. Wells, Jules Verne and other science fiction writers embody in their art the advances in material culture that mobilize, reproduce and distribute with new rapidity, determining the cultural logic of twentieth-century science fiction in the process.

Humanitarian action has become more prominent, partly because of the reluctance of states to accept refugees. This text examines issues such as whether humanitarian action saves lives or prolongs wars, whether it is compatible with economic sanctions, and whether military assistance is useful.