Review of The This by Adam Roberts

Adam Roberts is that maddening sportsman who has trophies on the shelf to show he is a winner but doesn’t always show up to play. With an irregular training scheme and dynamic mentality, he instead depends on innate talent to win matches. Naturally, this results in inconsistency; he’s not always a threat for the podium. For the reader, this means they never know what they are going to get with Roberts—certainly one type of appeal. With 2022’s The This we get the chance to A) test the accuracy of Google’s search algorithm, and B) answer the question: has Roberts once again channeled his innate talent to make a run for the winner’s circle, or is it just another quiet bowing out in the group stage?

Working with Robert’s love of θ, we get The This. After a surreal, cosmic cycle to open the novel, the book settles into the life of Rich Rigby. A typical 30-something male in the mid-21st century, Rich spends his days waiting for freelance writing gigs, playing video games, indulging in internet porn, and of course, thumb-fucking his mobile phone into loneliness. Almost all of his waking life spent online, he becomes interested in a breakthrough technology that saves users time by installing tech in the brain. Text messages, online searches, etc. no longer require tiresome finger movements. Such activities can all be done mentally, thus freeing users’ hands to perform other useful activities. The name of the tech is The This. While Rich is initially skeptical, the corporate forces that be eventually win him over, broadening his horizons in ways every major, human technical breakthrough has: for better and worse. But such blasé commentary is not Roberts’ point. Read on to find out.

While on the surface, with its entrenched social apps and finger on the pulse of modern society, The This would firmly seem a 2022 novel. And indeed it is globally, politically, sociologically, and technologically aware; Roberts keeps his tongue in cheek regarding all the things swirling around our modern lives (Twitter, gender, Trump/populism, etc.) without resorting to finger pointing or outright dependence on those things to generate reaction or interest. But The This is more than contemporary observation. For 2022 and beyond, Roberts looks to the bigger picture. More precisely, he looks to the long-term meaning of the individual’s existence in society. Which is where we too go to the larger picture of science fiction, and the novel’s contemporaries.

The This possesses strong hints of writers like Robert Sheckley and Rudy Rucker—the sly kind of understated sarcasm/parody that gives the narrative a layer of wit the reader can really appreciate. But the novel that kept ringing a bell in my mind is Kurt Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan. While ostensibly deploying classic sf tropes—remote controlled humans, little green men, space flight, etc., Vonnegut was in fact digging into a fundamental aspect of human existence: free choice. Roberts’ choice for theme is different (existentialism), but his modus operandi is similar—to use classic tropes to examine more complex subject matter in witty fashion. From the cyclical opening to the far-future of human hive minds, Roberts probes the meaning of it all to the individual. Like Vonnegut, Roberts prevents the discussion from becoming heavy and burdensome by using said classic devices, hence the comparison.

A word should be said about the structure/form of The This: atypical. The novel does not follow standard story form: intro-body-climax-conclusion. Intro and conclusion do form relatively standard bookends, at least from a thematic perspective, but what lies between is different—not radically different, rather something that helps keep the reader engaged for freshness and unpredictability as it occasionally flashes sensawunda sf tropes, and yet underpins theme further.

(Side comment: The title of the titular technology (say that ten times fast) is unfortunate as only English speakers (and Barcelonians) have the chance to find the title verbally clever. The rest of the world must push their tongues into ‘θs’—not an easy thing, and thus may not latch on as quickly. I mean, just imagine TikTok’s chances of success in China or Argentina if it were ThikThok…)

In the end, The This plays with some familiar tropes of science fiction (hive minds, technological telepathy, future wars, etc.), but does so in such unpredictable, intelligent fashion that the reader never knows what’s coming next. It’s something akin to a prior Roberts’ novel, The Thing Itself, but is more focused, a la Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan. Combining all this with understated wit commenting on the social and political state of modern times, the novel is highly readable, and at a minimum something different than what the market is churning out these days. Returning to the metaphor of the introduction, it can be said that Roberts makes a semifinals appearance with The This—not quite the winner’s circle, but certainly a worthy effort the sportsman—and reader—can go home very satisfied with. For me, Roberts hasn’t written this well in years, and I’m putting it in the early running for best of 2022.