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By Light Alone

The initial research idea was for a writer of SF to liaise with a professional scientist, and collaborate on a story. Roberts worked with Professor Rein Ulijn (now at the University of Strathclyde), renowned for his work on polymeric biomaterials. Roberts idea was for a world in which people were genetically engineered to be able to photosynthesise energy directly from the sun through their hair. Following this research he wrote a 10,000-word short story, ‘Hair’, published in Ryman (ed) When it Changed (Comma 2009). He then worked to expand this idea into a full-length novel. Writing the novel involved not just extrapolating the initial (scientific or thought-experimental) idea across a longer space, but rather working through the implications of the technology. Positing that it would lead to a larger division between rich (who could afford to eat) and poor. Roberts’ novel constellates Voltaire’s Candide with two High Modernist texts,Eliot’s The Waste Land and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels. By Light Alone works closely to reproduce formal and intertextually allusive elements from all three works into a contemporary SF narrative.