Jack Glass by Adam Roberts (Gollancz, July 2012, 373 pages) Jack Glass is an impossible book. +++ I’ve had this on my radar ever since it came out but it wasn’t until it won the British Science Fiction Award for Best Novel this year that I decided to read it. Jack Glass is ostensibly a blend of Golden Age Science Fiction and Golden Age Crime – to which point this is a homage or subversion is up for discussion. I feel it’s both. +++ The opening line is one of the best opening lines I have ever read: This narrative, which I hereby doctorwatson for your benefit, o reader, concerns the greatest mystery of our time. +++ It’s a Science Fiction novel. Set in the far future – humanity has travelled extensively in the Solar System and spread out as far as it can go. There are trillions of us now, a minority of the super wealthy who run things and a vast majority of super poor – it’s not even simply polloi anymore, it’s sumpolloi – who inhabit shanty bubbles across the System with nothing but the bare minimum for subsistence. Those who are really lucky end up working […]