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George Outhwaite @georgeouthwaite.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I have one in the post

I’m really itching to read the rest of Keith Roberts’s out of print work because, not only is he a beautiful writer, but when read Pavane (his only book still in print) I interpreted in the first few stories, a certain amount of closeted and confused queer longing, revolving around feelings of being stuck, of needing to escape from a life your body has trapped you in, and of the apparent futility of even trying to manifesting those desires. But I concluded that as usual I’m just projecting and it’s probably just a normal book written by a normal man.

The next book I read was The Chalk Giants and I was immediately hit with quite a tragic crossdressing scene, not only is this book out of mainstream print but in America this chapter and all other chapters mentioning this character were excised from the book, completely destroying its structure. So I guess all I’m saying is I really want to see what else he wrote that was deemed unworthy reprinting, I know I was very difficult to work with but that can’t be the whole story, the books are out there and by all accounts the quality of his writing was consistent across his career, so it’s not like the later books are going to be bad I hope. This is a man who by the time he died had had most of his limbs amputated, don’t you want to read what he was writing?!

George Outhwaite@georgeouthwaite.bsky.social

Apparently, in the last year of his life, Keith Roberts wrote a miserable novel that was only ever serialised in a short lived British science fiction magazine from the early 2000s and I’ve never wanted to read anything more

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adrian @somerabbits.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Ooooo, interesting. Big fan of Anita and Pavane, hope you manage to piece this one together!

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George Outhwaite @georgeouthwaite.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

oh I don't have one of the magazines in the post just another novel, to be honest there's so much more reasonably accessible stuff I haven't read yet that it'll be a while until that is that last frontier

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