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Jack Glass: A Golden Age Story

The primary research impulse was a desire to combine the rhetorical and formal strategies of the ‘Golden Age’ SF novel with those of the Golden Age puzzle whodunit (these Golden Ages refer to different epochs: the 1940s-50s and 1920s-30s respectively). This had rarely been attempted in genre, in part because of the widely held view that SF is a primarily ontological, crime a primary epistemological, mode (Linda Hutcheon and others argue this)—a position Roberts sought to challenge. To prepare for the project Roberts read widely in both Golden Age crime and SF, and gave two talks (Liverpool John Moores University and London) about his plans. Roberts attempted to bridge the ontological ‘world-building’ and epistemological ‘problem-solving’ aspects, by generating a ‘learning the world’ narrative, whereby on the level of social organisation, religious belief and even fundamental physics and the world itself presented a series of tiered problems to be solved, and building the whole via intertextual references to classic tropes of the crime mode—the whodunit, the locked room mysteries, the prison story—and specific authors: Asimov, Kipling, Dorothy Sayers, Michael Innes and Agatha Christie (Christie’s ‘Roger Ackroyd’ becomes a design of ‘Record and Contract droid’ and so on). As with other of Roberts's books, the whole has a tripartite structure: three separate whodunits that figure as the text’s larger thesis/antithesis/synthesis, in part to address this process of combining different modes; and it makes a great deal of dreams (imagined worlds built by the mind that invite whodunit—or, we might say, whatmeansit—decoding). The research has been disseminated by publishing the novel (winning two awards), blogging, being interviewed in SF magazines and other media. Roberts was invited to the University of Kansas, and to be Guest of Honour at the Futura SF Convention in Birmingham (both June 2013) to talk about the novel.