A new Adam Roberts is always a treat. This short story collection entitled 'Adam Robots' is no exception, providing 24 vignettes of varying length, covering science fiction tropes from time travel, to alternate history, space opera and robot stories. They are crafted with dark humour, with and a fine turn of prose. ( )

Everywhere she looked she saw people abasing themselves before her: men bending forward to tie their shoes, women leaning over to rest laden shopping bags on the floor. Bowing down. An illusion, though. There was nothing special about her. She was as perfectly ordinary as anybody else in the world. And the world itself was perfectly unexceptional, ordinary, banal, in cosmic terms a Copernican un-wonder.

Most of the stories in this collection are science fiction, with a few being more like folk tales. I've read one or two of them before, definitely "Shall I Tell You The Problem With Time Travel", which is a tale of time travel experiments and nuclear bombs, and either "ReMorse" or something with a very similar premise.

My favourite stories were "Anticopernicus", "Me-topia" in which humans have left the polluted earth to genetically engineered Neanderthals, and "Thrownness" about a man who is transferred into a new, but very similar, alternate world every 3 days. ( )

My first love was science fiction short stories and this guy pulls out all the stops for this collection. He is obviously a very clever man but may actually be a little too clever for me in some of these stories. ( )

Or is it the other way round? Never mind. As it says quite prominently on the cover, this is a collection of short stories, a number of which are original to the book (although the page which gives original publication details seems to be missing a couple). I’d thought I’d read quite a few of Roberts’s stories, but many of the ones in here were new to me. Except, I have read at least three of the anthologies in which a story in this collection originally appeared… One of these I liked, despite the thump-worthy pun in the last line. Another struck me as a neat idea stretched just a tad too far. And the third… seems as memorable after this second read as it was after the first. The stories in Adam Robots are never less than very readable, and Roberts can indeed turn a lovely phrase, and often does, but there’s also a sense that some of the pieces are lacking in… thickening. Perhaps it’s the sf story as Gedankenexperiment, an exploration of premise but not necessarily a thoroughly rigorous examination of it – which, on occasion, does make the story feel as though it exists only as a vessel to hold a premise rather than as an armature for a narrative. In the shorter pieces, of course, this is not an issue – the space is limited. Having said that, the saving grace of many of these stories is that Roberts carefully positions them as stories – it’s literary device deployment rather than immersion. The end result is a collection that is both enjoyable and impressive – and definitely good value for money as it contains twenty-four stories. I do have one peeve, however: the title ‘Review: Thomas Hodgkin, Denis Bayle: a Life (Red Rocket Books 2003), 321pp, £20. ISBN: 724381129524′. That ISBN is 12-digit. There are only 10-digit and 13-digit ISBNs. And if missing a digit was done to prevent accidentally giving the ISBN of a real book… well, the last number is a checksum. Just make it fail the checksum and it can’t be a real book. ( )

Glorious mash-up of the Garden of Eden fable and two robots straight out of Asimov's universe. ( )