Kiteworld

Kiteworld

by Keith Roberts

The Realm of Kiteworld has survived nuclear catastrophe and is governed by a feudal and militant religious oligarchy - the Church Variant.

In the outer Badlands, real or imagined Demons are kept at bay by flying defensive structures of giant interlocking Cody kites piloted by an elite and brave Corps of Observers.

Through a series of Kite stories we are drawn compellingly into a strange but recognizable world where loyalty to the Corps is everything and non-conformity a sin. Keith Roberts depicts the fortunes, passions and failings of his characters against this background of a fragile and superstitious society. As the fanatical Ultras embark on a religious campaign of destruction, the Realm starts to disintegrate — fast.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Fantasy, Speculative Fiction

288 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published June 1, 1985

About the author

Used These Alternate Names: Alistair Bevan , John Kingston , David Stringer

Keith John Kingston Roberts was a British science fiction author. He began publishing with two stories in the September 1964 issue of Science Fantasy magazine, "Anita" (the first of a series of stories featuring a teenage modern witch and her eccentric granny) and "Escapism.

Several of his early stories were written using the pseudonym Alistair Bevan. His second novel, Pavane, which is really a collection of linked stories, may be his most famous work: an alternate history novel in which the Roman Catholic Church takes control of England following the assassination of Queen Elizabeth I.

Roberts wrote numerous novels and short stories, and also worked as an illustrator. His artistic contributions include covers and interior artwork for New Worlds and Science Fantasy, later renamed Impulse. He also edited the last few issues of Impulse although the nominal editor was Harry Harrison.

In later life, Roberts lived in Salisbury. He was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1990, and died of its complications in October 2000. Obituaries recalled him as a talented but personally 'difficult' author, with a history of disputes with publishers, editors and colleagues.

Reviews

[Steve Field · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many people cite 'Pavane' as Roberts' best work, but for me it's 'Kiteworld'. This is a post-nuclear catastrophe world where the safety measures and precautions used to guard against contamination have been ritualised and absorbed into the prevailing religion, to the extent that the original reasons have long been forgotten.

The world slowly emerges story by story, each one taken from the viewpoint of one of the inhabitants, all of whom have a connection to the military kite force, a dedicated band of men who fly tethered hangliders over land and sea to ward of evil spirits. The kite force is very recognisable, akin to the Royal Flying Corps, but the pilots and men risk their lives in all weathers, some of them lose their faith, their health or their minds. There is an underlying current of rebellion against the puritanical religious sects and, unusually for SciFi and Fantasy, Roberts manages to draw rich and believable characters with his deft prose and interesting story telling.

I loved this book, although I haven't read it for many years. Maybe I should reacquaint myself with it.

[Kay · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those weirdly indescribable books. 'Read it' is really all I can say. People either rave about this man's work or hate him, and I'm a big fan; his view is hallucinogenically strange, but highly realistic - he's the real father of steampunk, whose alternative future in Pavane (where Britain remains in pre-industrial social and economic stages, but with a highly structured religious framework) is a glory to experience.

Kiteworld though, is a world where blue demons strike from on high and Kite riders save the world from a fate worse than death ... or do they? There's some freaky sexual role-play in this one, excellent world-building and a spare, somewhat frightening, refusal to bend to the dicates of normal narrative. I love it.

[Rick · Rating 2 out of 5]

Keith Robert’s “Kiteworld” was an interesting read … odd, but interesting. Apparently set in a post-apocalyptic world, the residents are protected by an organized military corps of Kiteflyers who patrol the skies and protect the land from flying demons, mostly coming from the Badlands or the border areas. There are also ground troops that protect citizens from demons that crawl. We never actually see a demon but we are made to be vaguely afraid of them. In the background, two competing religions – Variants and Middle Doctrines - vie for the hearts and minds of the people, and control most commerce.

Self-billed as a fantasy novel and cited as a Sci-Fi book, this narrative just didn’t have much of a Sci-Fi feel. It was oddly engaging, mildly erotic throughout, and filled with religious overtones. All the protagonists seem related to kites – there is a Kitemaster, a Kitewaif, a Kitecadet … you get the idea. The world is called the Realm and it is pretty ordinary, albeit a bit backward. The citizens do regular sorts of things … some are farmers, and some fish for a living, and others operate a market to buy and sell goods. We follow our kite-related main characters as they work in and around the normal citizens, all the while tending to the business of keeping kites aloft to protect the skies.

After almost setting the book aside a number of times, I gave it the old college try and finished. It was only mildly satisfying, although it did end on a somewhat of a fantasy note. There was just too much build up for what little I received in the end. I guess it just wasn’t really my cup of tea.

[Sean Smart · Rating 2 out of 5]

I loved Pavane which led me to Kiteworls but I just could not get in to this one and found it muddled. I needed to look up some explanations of what I was reading which is never a good sign. I think it had potential but was lost somewhere.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 3 out of 5]

A-, offbeat English social fantasy. 3.5 stars, I'd guess. Read in 2001.

[Darnoc Leadburger · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are a handful of British authors that I was introduced to by Stephen E. Andrews over at his YouTube Channel (The Outlaw Bookseller) that I wouldn't have gotten around to reading yet if it wasn't for him. Keith Roberts - most known for his alternate history novel *Pavane* or even his giant-bee cozy catastrophe *The Furies* - is part of that handful. I found *Kiteworld* at my favorite used bookshop in Nashville last year, and it was the first Roebrts book I'd seen in the flesh, so I was pretty excited. As it turns out, I was right in expecting beautiful prose and compelling characters and got all of that, but there was also some weirdness that I'm not sure I needed, although I also can't argue with the results of this strange, sometimes confusing, and ultimately admirable novel.

*Kiteworld* is composed of different stories; some of them, like the opening story "Kitemaster," were published as short stories in their own right before this book. "Kitemaster" sets the scene of this post-nuclear-war Europe and its society which puts men into the sky on "Lifters" carried/steered by different kites every day and night through a conversation between the titular Kitemaster and a Kitecaptain (who leads a Kite-flying base) about the religion that dictates kites must be flown to keep little blue demons from killing people. This scene sews seeds of religious strife, the physical reality of the Kites, and the societal structure of the culture. "Kitecadet" shifts our focus to a young man named Raoul still learning to fly kites and his excursions to the capital of Middlemarch during festival times. He meets a young girl named Rye but their relationship is soured by an encounter he has in a Kite in where he kills a "disgustingly female" little blue demon by beheading it. This leads him to leave the Corps in the third story, "Kitemistress," which shows him becoming a private Kiteman for a rich woman named Lady Kerosina, whose feminine whiles he succumbs to before crawling back to Rye in Middlemarch as a wreck. My favorite story included was the forth, "Kitecaptain," even though it was the most brutal. It explores its main character Justin Manning in the same way that "Kitecadet" and "Kiteservant" explored their main characters: by telling parallel narratives split between the gradually nearing past and the present. Justin Manning grew up in a nice farming family but he can't help but want to fly Kites, eventually becoming the last living family member to his developmentally stunted younger sister, who he sends fancy clothes from Middlemarch and eventually enters an incestuous relationship with after finding her raped by hired help and physically beating both her and her assailant. It's enough turn of events to send Manning into a suicidal Kiteflight in the dead of a nighttime thunderstorm; it really was potent and affected me in a way that no other story in *Kiteworld* did.

The aforementioned "Kiteservant" is about a man named Rand who promised his father on his deathbed that he wouldn't fly kites and follow the same depressing path that he did. He was never able to stay away for long, though, so he became part of the Ground Crew and eventually a base auditor in order to quench his urges. This story shows his current trek to the city of Fishgard where he must audit some Corps bases at the same time as it shows his upbringing and his once-positive relationship with a woman named Janni soil once she leaves him for his shrewd guardian, a sleezy old man... "Kitewaif" continues his story and puts it alongside that of a young girl named Velvet who has no parents and barely has a home. She does odd jobs and pimps out local children (and possibly Rye, who now lives in Fishgaird with Raoul) to the Mistress Kerosina, who has also recently relocated. Rand feels paternally responsible for her now and takes her with him when he moves away after "Kitemariner," which shows these characters through the lens of a guy who flies Kites at sea against his wife's wishes. They're officially moved out in "Kitekillers," which culminates (after Velvet returns to pimping for Kerosina and hence ruining her life with Rand) in a conflict between the religious groups of the Variant Church, the Middle Way, and the Ultras, a conflict teased at different groups wanting to dispose of Manning's body in different ways or the seaside conflict at the end of "Kitemariner." Rand is able to rescue Velvet and reunite with Janni (who apparently left Rand so he wouldn't be killed) in time for the Kitemaster from the first chapter to find them in a giant tank and hand them off to silvery aliens who land in a "Dragonfly" along with the little sister from "Kitecaptain" because history's repeating itself and he wants the best of humanity to go among the stars... all this intense stuff leads to a crazy ending which can only earn the title of best or worst ending I've read in quite a while...

While it's not the most exciting thing to talk about first, I'd first like to dissect Roberts' prose. It has good imagery and really nice turn of phrase that always felt fresh in the same way as my other favorite writers (in terms of prose) from the 80s, like Walter Jon Williams, but it also uses some grammatical conventions that were a bit out of the ordinary. For example, Roberts liberally used semicolons and often used them early in a sentence before continuing with a couple clauses that should have had commas, but they didn't. There were also sentence fragments placed on either side of said semicolons or commas (when they weren't bookended by periods) in a way that wasn't always very noticeable. I'm not upset at these characteristics; I just found them interesting. Roberts also wasn't afraid to put extra dialogue tags or additional physical movement in the middle of what would otherwise be straight paragraphs of speech, something that I don't see a lot of writers (besides me) do. I admired the identifiable quirks that set *Kiteworld*'s writing apart from most novels', and I'll be interested to see if Robert's style persists through other of his works.

The plotting was interesting because *Kiteworld* sat somewhere between the realms of a fix-up novel and a baton-passing novel like Eschbach's criminally underrated *The Hair-Carpet Weavers* in which every chapter was from a character from the preceding chapter's point of view. After all, stories two and three and five through eight all flow into each other, and only three (and not eight) of these stories had been published before, which makes this hard to categorize. Everything does seem to crescendo along the lines of religious struggle, but it's all buried in individual stories which simultaneously build the world and shed light on things that makes earlier chapters make more sense in retrospect. The worldbuilding is really well done, and I felt I had a grasp on the three lands and how people in different parts of life interacted and everything by the end of it without information *ever* being dumped - Roberts definitely just throws you into the world and leaves it to yourself to swim. There are a couple points where that failed, namely when it comes to religion and how the Kites/Lifter/what-have-you physically work; I still couldn't tell you what separates the different religions and can't for life of me visualize what Pilot kites and like actually do, even if I understand they're flown to protect the Realm from demons which are probably mutants. I think I'd get more from the religious aspects if I reread the book, so I'm okay with that, but the physicality of the flying still bugs me, but not as much as it did in the first fifty pages. It's probably the only place where Roberts' prose is at fault. Now, some would say his plotting's at fault with that head-scratching ending, but I at least appreciated that Roberts wrapped several plot threads up with that, so I think I can give it a pass.

I think readers will have mixed views on the characters. Some people will be upset that we're yanked between several of them instead of just sticking with one, but I quite like mosiac-esque novels, so that won't even factor into my criticism. I do think that they're engaging and compelling, but I don't know if they're exactly... relatable. There's something about the way they're framed and their moral qualities (including occasional sick perversion) that reminds me of Walter Jon William's *Hardwired*, a cyberpunk novel from 1986, which is always a positive comparison for me. I can't explain why they made me feel compelled because a lot of them did awful things, and things like beating your wife are kind of taken for granted here, but I suppose that's because they feel raw and the things that they go through are in some way powerful. I was stricken a couple of times, and I was always intrigued to pick up hints about where certain characters had ended up from the edges of other characters' stories. It is notable that most of the main characters have lost parents in some way, shape, or form, which leads to a distinct personality pattern in them, I think. Weird relations between men and women also seem to have been on Roberts' mind while writing this, because there almost seems to be a thematic purpose in a lot of the sexual relations here - as a side note, if you're kind of sensitive about that three-letter-word, than this book probably won't be for you (or at the very least, skip over "Kitecaptain".

But speaking of themes, *Kiteworld* has stronger religious overtones than I expected. It actually reminded me of *A Canticle for Leibowitz* (possibly both the greatest SF novel from the 50s and the best religious science fiction book of all time) in the way that it shows religion, even a line of fictional ones set upon flying kites in the sky, as nursing a society back to health and then its destruction yet again. The themes seemed buried, though, and never quite revealed themselves or made an impact on me. I did feel this instinctual sense of this being a really good book the whole through - the kind of sense I get with most of the, say, 15% percent of books I read, especially those about SF worlds that you're just thrown into - but that's due to the sometimes-masterful intersection between prose, character, and world, not because of the themes. If more care had been paid to meanings it could've been an even better book than it was - maybe even a true all-timer - but it just couldn't stick that landing and make me think about big, grand-scale crap. Still, I don't want to spend more time ragging on this, because everything else gave me a nascent thrill that I don't always get.

Sometimes it takes writing down your thoughts on a book to tell you how you really felt about it, and this experience definitely made me feel more solid about this book, as did talking about it with my girlfriend; discussing this book just makes me want to gush about it, and that's usually a good sign that a book deserves as least an 8.5/10, which is what a hereby ascribe to *Kiteworld.* It's a cleverly-structured novel with an authorial prowess that I can really respect even if a few parts of the book were a little underbaked. It just put me in the perfect headspace for reading science fiction, especially that from between 1985-1989, which is part of the reason I read. I enjoyed this book, and hope you will too. I don't own any more Roberts so it'll probably be a while until I reunite with him, but I look forward to when I do. Thanks for reading this long-winded review, and if you've read this book or are about to, let me know what you think because this is the kind of book you really like to talk to. Until then, have a good one!

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kiteworld is a novel built on wind and whispers, a fragmented tapestry of stories that drift together to create a mythic, melancholic vision of a world reborn from the ashes of ours. Keith Roberts imagines a future Britain transformed into a patchwork of feudal territories, guarded not by satellites or missiles—but by kite-flyers, high-flying warrior-priests who defend the realm from monstrous threats said to lurk beyond the borders of the sky.

The world has changed. Technology has been buried under centuries of forgetting. Borders are now walls of air and belief, and the kites—giant airborne gliders piloted by courageous men and women—are not just weapons, but symbols of faith and national memory.

At the heart of this dreamlike narrative is Darrien, a novice kite-guard with doubts and questions—about his duty, his religion, and the nature of the Enemy beyond the Barrier. Through him (and others), Roberts slowly reveals a society held aloft by fear, superstition, and a fierce code of honor, while suggesting that the greatest danger may lie within, not beyond.

The novel is episodic and meditative, told through multiple perspectives and shifting tones—part oral history, part diary, part military saga. There’s a constant tension between belief and doubt, between the soaring heroism of the kites and the grim truths buried in their flight paths. You’ll find echoes of Orwell, Le Guin, and Ballard, but the voice is unmistakably Roberts’—elegant, austere, deeply human.

There’s no easy resolution, no galactic rebellion, no singular villain to defeat. Kiteworld is about the stories we tell to survive, the institutions we create to protect those stories, and the cost of flying too close to the sun—or the truth.

In essence, Kiteworld is a haunting meditation on memory, myth, and the machines of belief—both literal and cultural. It’s a slow-burn, poetic masterwork that dares to ask: What if the sky itself was our last line of defense, and faith the only engine we had left to fly?

[Rob Frampton · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF
Turgid and aimless after the genius of 'Pavane'.

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up this audiobook based solely on the fact that Gideon Emery was narrating it, because I have a bit of a voice-crush on him. The book was actually better than I expected: part steampunk, part sci-fi, it's the story of a world (that seems to be not Earth) long years after some kind of disaster made most of the land uninhabitable by the "Folk" of the main realm and instead inhabited by "demons" (the general consensus of reviewers seems to be that it was a nuclear war and the demons are simply mutants). The realm is solidly in the grip of the Church, and protected from the "demons" by the Kite Corp - a quasi-military organisation under the Church that flies giant kite rigs all around the borders of the realm, large enough to lift the observers who take shifts in giant baskets, keeping watch for demons and armed with a pistol and a holy book.

The story is told through interconnected short stories in a mosaic fashion, although the second half becomes increasingly focused on a particular character and those around them. It's not always immediately obvious how one story links to the previous ones, but the connections are always there (and the kites are always involved).

There's some kinky sex and some incest, some violence (particularly towards women and children) and some child abuse. Avoid if any of those themes will be triggering or otherwise unpleasant for you. Worth checking out if you're interested in early steampunk or 80s sci-fi.

[Insouciantly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is less a novel and more like a sequential series of short stories that lead to a powerful climax. In this world, the church is powerful, and has lead the populace to believe in the danger of demons who are trying to invade their society. The way to protect yourself from the demons is flying kites in the sky with powerful symbology. Then there are the kitemen, they fly the skies in giant kites and protect the borders of the realm. The kitemen are the heroes of the realm, and they touch so many aspects of life. This book tells the tales of several kitemen, and the people who support kitemen, or meet them, or are influenced by them, and what happens when they question their society, or feel there is something wrong with the world around them.

[Ari · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thoroughly unsatisfying; the deus ex machina ending made me wonder if Mr. Roberts got a ways in, stood, threw up his hands, and exclaimed, "screw it, let's just go to press".

The world is engaging enough, if a little confusing. Keeping track of the non-linear storytelling was difficult, and the first segment told in first-person POV was incongruous with the third-person remainder.

If you must read it, I highly recommend the audiobook version, which is narrated by the superb narrator Gideon Emery.

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

VOTO: 3,7
Più che un romanzo completo è una raccolta di 3 racconti lunghi dello stesso universo narrativo e che narrano una serie di vicende susseguentisi grosso modo in ordine cronologico.
Nel complesso non male e coinvolgente al punto giusto: le chiavi di lettura sono interessanti ed è facile coglierne una allegoria al ruolo che oggigiorno giocano le istituzioni religiose e al culto delle religioni in generale.

[Eija · Rating 4 out of 5]

Koostuu useasta lyhyemmästä elämäntarinasta, jotka nivotaan myöhemmässä vaiheessa yhteen. Miljöö on karu ja julmakin. Pidin kerronnasta.