Adam Roberts is quickly becoming one of my favorite science fiction writers working today. I know I’ve only reviewed one of his novels, Purgatory Mount, but I’ve read two others, and as your about to find out, three of his novellas. I’m trying something a little different as I try to talk about three thematically resonant novellas, instead of doing an overly deep dive into each individually. I will be discussing Stealing For The Sky, High, and The Midas Rain all by Adam Roberts.
The first thing that the three of these stories have in common are that they are all distinct heist novels that have no plot or character crossovers. The heists are insane acts conducted by deranged but highly competent men. In Stealing, a man known as Starman steals made-to-order space ships for wealthy clients or down on their luck national space programs. High follows Hi, a strange, and near psychopathic wet worker who is tasked to steal a woman’s daughter back from her ex-husband who lives on Mars. Midas Rain is a stream of consciousness from Paul, as he concocts a plan to steal a meteor made of complete gold from an orbital mining company as they crash it to Earth to reap unprecedented profits. All of them have some wild science fiction concepts that aid or hinder the protagonist in their goal. And if you’ve ever read Roberts’ work before, it contains his special brand of dark and stormy sense of humor. It’s dry, has a delicious sour bite to it, and you can’t stop yourself from drinking it (that might be personal though).
What makes each work so well is that there is not a lot of dilly dallying around between the planning and the heist itself. Each story has its own pace, but all of them have a frenetic need to get the job done on their own schedule. Stealing takes place in the wilderness of Russia and ebbs and flows as the traffic on its lesser used roads. High goes to great lengths to highlight the distance between Earth and Mars, and the various ways one could travel, adding time to the front end, while leaving the reader questioning how the escape can work. And Midas Rain is an avalanche of catastrophes and revelations starting from the get go as there are betrayals, double crosses and even triple crosses from the various characters as the nature of the heist is revealed. I think Stealing here is the weakest in this regard as there aren’t as many moments for Roberts, through his protagonist, to describe the science or morality behind certain acts against the systems that the protagonists are locked in battle with. I’ll get into this a little more later, but I think Midas Rain feels the most well crafted and if you’re caught up in what Roberts’ is selling, you’re more than likely to finish it in a single sitting. High achieves a good balance for me, but there was just something about Midas Rain that puts it over the top for me. It might help that chronologically it was most recently written/released and Roberts’ has had time to play with the shortened form and learn from the previous two outings.
Roberts, in my experience, is a bit of a chameleon when it comes to framing his prose for the book at hand. The language pulled me into the reality of the book, not in an escapist fashion where I can get lost in the characters, but in the way that I have to alter my brain to fit that of the character narrating the story. Each feels steeped in how the individual protagonists view the world. Stealing still feels the weakest here, but it’s still a strong showing. Starman often feels like he is regaling the audience with his rules for conducting himself in situations gone awry to the point they feel like mantras. Hi, from High, has a notably detached frame of reference – one that has a huge payoff in the final moments of the story – and allows for the few shifts in perspective that occur. Midas Rain makes the reader feel like they are in the thick of it as Paul holds all the cards, playing them at just the right time to throw both his pursuers and the reader off his scent. In the moments where Paul is explaining his reasoning, it feels like he is proselytizing, bringing you into the madness of his scheme and it’s wonderful.
Something I truly appreciate about Roberts’ is how he approaches action. Action in each of these books feels fluid, colorful, heavy hitting and above all brutal. People die in pretty horrific 
ways, but described in very wondrous language. There is a specific scene where someone is shot in Stealing, the projectile originating from an adversaries pocket, and the imagery from Roberts’ words made me visualize a sentient ribbon flying into a man, extinguishing his life force. I could literally see it happen because the language felt so obtainable, so specifically from Starman’s understanding that he could barely comprehend what he was seeing, that he had to process it as something else to understand the weight of what just happened. And this is a man who deals with nefarious and militant separatist types quite often. High has several moments where Hi is surrounded by men and the action highlights his own ingenuity in seeing these situations as puzzles to solve that involve stacked dice rolls. He doesn’t always calculate correctly, but it feels triumphant despite the fact that several people have just been removed from the universe. Midas Rain is a bit more subdued on the man to man action, but instead contains magnificently large set pieces paired descriptions of torture and one sided violence that turn the stomach. He does not revel in violence, merely gives it its due.
Thematically, I want to focus on each book a little more individually as that might give you an idea of which ones you might want to explore on your own. But essentially, each book has a shallow to deep investigation of the systems at work to highlight something about our world, while highlighting how truly insane the heist at hand is.
Stealing For The Sky falls short on this one for me personally. It doesn’t really feel like it knows what it wants to be about when it comes to stealing space ships. Starman is contracted to steal an ancient rocket for a growing Irkutski separatist movement from a Russian rocketry museum. In the course of events he encounters a strange orb that has implications at the end of the story but doesn’t stand out in a spectacular way throughout the story. There are one or two asides about the history of space travel and imagining space travel. These are particularly fun if you only know the American Cold War narrative about the space race, but they definitely feel more like short asides. Starman has an unstated goal of what he wants to do with his slowly gathering earnings from various jobs, but its surface is barely ever scratched. In a world where billionaires have their own private space yachts and are able to escape the confines of gravity while immiserating the people of Earth, I was expecting a little more of a punch. The best I could sort of come up with is that escaping Earth and exploring the cosmos for its own sake is a dream of the past, and that space is a play place for the rich to live out their fantasies while the rest of us have to do the hard work of making a living on the hell they’ve turned the planet into. It feels subtextually there, but it’s not nearly as explicit as some of the themes that were explored in the other two novellas. But at least there is something that I’m still mulling over and I can’t stop thinking about Starman’s quest.
High is a more “grounded” version of Total Recall, the Verhoeven-Schwarzenegger hyper-violent science fiction masterpiece. Hi needs to get to Mars, but since it’s tightly controlled by the rich who inhabit it, his methods are limited. There is a whole chapter dedicated to Hi smuggling himself into a cargo container with the bare minimum of supplies to keep himself alive as he catapulted beyond the atmosphere, subjected to the radiation of outer space and forced to keep his mind and body exercised for nine months in total isolation to avoid detection. It gives Roberts the room to flex his harder sci-fi leanings, pointing out the futility of such space travel. He also dives into the price of a ticket for the average schmo trying to find new prosperity in the corporate feudal kingdoms of Mars, expanding on the history of indentured servitude as people traveled from England to America to escape prosecution and hard times. This is done through a series of bidding that could have you lose your contract on the way to Mars with no prospects forced to return home accruing even more debt. I will admit, your mileage may vary on how these types of things are presented, but I appreciated Roberts’ blunt style in High. The detached nature of the narration eased me into these sections, but also I’m an absolute sucker for the terrible ways in which we promise things to working people, only to yank them away so that those who stand to profit, profit even more. High succeeds in pointing these things out in a way that leads to the process of the heist, without necessarily making it the point of the heist. Well, sort of, but I’ll let you read it to make up your mind about it.
If you can’t tell, Midas Rain is my absolute favorite of the bunch here. To be fair, this is the one I started with, so it may have colored my expectations for the other two, but I also feel it’s just the most well crafted of them. Gary, Indiana is not a great place to live in the future. It’s crowded with the possibility for prospects, but you have to contend with the fact that The Company is just crashing meteors into the ground in Gary all the time and their calculations aren’t the best. The air is consistently filled with dust from the collisions making respirators, or at least a mask, a requirement. People’s lives, whether they choose to live in Gary or are stuck there due to systemic forces, are expendable as more often than not these meteors will crash into residential areas. It’s just simply cheaper to slam them into the ground and dig them out than it is to guide them cleanly into a designated area. Paul is an absolutely manic bastard that feels like he has ten aces up his sleeve but that they keep sliding down his shirt and into his pant legs so he can’t reach them when he most needs them. But he also has a vision for the golden meteor he is trying to steal from the company. This leads to incredible diatribes on the nature of money, wealth inequality, and the forces that prop up both while making sure that no one else gets a piece of the action. And by god, does everyone want a piece. The people that Paul gets involved with are mean and dirty, resorting to violence at the tip of a hat. Paul himself isn’t a push over either, and this isn’t his first rodeo. The ending to Midas Rain is so brutally spectacular and thematically resonant I’m still thinking about it three months after finishing the story. It has that feeling of being so distinctly succinct, so resolute in its morality it invites discussion. It wants to be picked apart over several beers. It begs for it, and goddamnit, I want someone to talk to about it.
Any one of these stories is worth your time. Do you have to read all three? Absolutely not, I’m not here to tell you what to consume. But they are all fun heist stories that add some oil to the gears in your brain. Yes, they have soapbox moments, but they feel a part of the story, not just some author ranting (though you could make the case for that too). They invite you into a wacky science fiction world so you can pick apart the nasty bits about our own, which in my opinion, is what good fiction, especially science fiction should aim to do. Roberts knows how to craft a fun weird story, populated by distinct and wild characters that you won’t forget. Plus, they’re all a dollar each for 100 to 140 pages of heist shenanigans if you have to make that calculation. I think even some of them, one can just ask for the PDF and they’ll send it. It gives each one the feeling that you’re watching someone experiment with their craft, and Roberts is a consistent tinkerer. Get on the train and go for a ride.
Rating: Stealing for the Sky, High, The Midas Rain – The Hat-Trick of Heists
-Alex
