Astral Weeks

This week at latimes.com/books, Ed Park devotes his science fiction column Astral Weeks to Adam Roberts' "Gradisil." Roberts is a professor of 19th century literature at the University of London, but his book owes a playful debt to a practitioner from a more modern period — Vladimir Nabokov. Park notes the literary gamesmanship, the references and layers, the overriding sense of style. At the same time, he highlights "Gradisil's" more trenchant realities, in which the future, much like the present, is defined by blood lust and intrigue. The more things change, this novel means to tell us, the more they stay the same.

Sitting on the bookstore shelf, Adam Roberts' new novel, "Gradisil" (Pyr: 552 pp., $15 paperback), makes few appeals to the general reader. The title, in a hard-to-read Transformers font, suggests an epic story centering on hair-regrowth formula, and the curiously cropped cover illustration manages to make an explosion soporific. But if you pick it up — perhaps with a furtive glance down the aisle — and read the first paragraph, something interesting happens:

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Additionally, close readers of Vladimir Nabokov will detect a nod to his late, quasi-sci-fi tale "Lance," whose narrator sees his story's "every dot and full stop" as describing a "kind of celestial star chart." Coincidence? Maybe. But consider that on "Gradisil's" acknowledgments page, Roberts thanks, amid the names of friends, one "Charles Kinbote," the mad annotator who turns Nabokov's "Pale Fire" inside out. Near the novel's end, Roberts also manages a double reference to "Look at the Harlequins!" Which is to say that "Gradisil" operates on multiple levels and that its pleasures lie not just in its densely plotted particulars but also in its unconventional, playful construction.

Where "Pale Fire" features Kinbote's commentary and other textual apparatus wrapped around John Shade's 999-line poem, "Gradisil" gives us — along with two heart-pouring memoirists — the adrenalized thoughts of a soldier free-falling thousands of miles from space as his unprotected left hand withers away, 22nd-century pop lyrics in three languages and passages crafted using a futuristic argot in which the letter "C" has apparently been outlawed. For all the seriousness in conception and the technological accuracy (he cites a hefty 1959 tome titled "Theory of Wing Sections, Including a Summary of Airfoil Data"), Roberts, author of numerous parodies (including something called "Dr. Whom, or E.T. Shoots and Leaves," about "a grammatically correct time lord"), leavens the proceedings with a wicked satirical thumbnail of a mumble-mouthed war-mongering president, a riff on "tailored books" (classics in which the reader's name is inserted) and awful poetry that could give the Vogons a run for their money.

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