Professor of Literature at Royal Holloway University, science fiction writer and critic, Adam Roberts is the author of numerous award-winning books, including Anticopernicus and New Model Army.

Interviewed here by Vassili Christodoulou, Roberts speaks about the role of anarchist science in science fiction, how 1950s youth culture became today's mainstream culture and why Ballard shouldn't be remembered as a dystopian writer.

Twenty Trillion Leagues is your second novel using Verne as a heuristic. Verne famously disagreed with Welles as to the liberties an author of scientific romance should take with technological plausibility and invention. How important is it to you to be true to Verne’s mandate for speculative fiction? Is it something you actively consider when drawing on his oeuvre, and if not, how does his work impact your own?

You’re right that Verne is sometimes taken as representing a ‘hard SF’ or scientific literature approach to genre, where Wells is a broader-brush fantasist. It comes from Verne reacting to Wells’s First Men in the Moon, where the heroes are transported lunarward by an anti-gravity metal called ‘Cavourite’. Not science, said Verne. When I send characters to the moon, he said, it is in a vessel fired out of a giant gun. This is the actual quotation: