You see, Dad has been receiving visions. Visions from a massive and intelligent interplanetary object that is hurtling toward Earth. These oracular messages mimic in large part the text of Jules Verne's anomalous novel Off on a Comet (1877), which Dad says was an earlier channeling of the interstellar prophecy. In other words, Hector Senior is predicting that the planet is going to be destroyed by an impact with the visitor, with only one particular shard or fragment or splinter of land remaining viable for human life.

Naturally, Hector Junior is somewhat dubious.

But like a loyal but conflicted son, he chooses to respond to his father's invitation to come to the apocalypse-ready refuge, out in the middle of the Mojave desert. There, amid warehouses full of survivalist supplies, he finds 14 people preparing for doomsday by cabling the bedrock together for better splinter integrity.

Shaking his head bemusedly, Hector, weary from travel, goes to sleep. In the night there's a phenomenon that appears to be a violent earthquake. In the morning, the ranch is surrounded by an opaque fog. Hector is informed that this fog is the remnant of the boiled-off Pacific Ocean. The splinter is adrift in the cosmos. Why do they still have full gravity? The high-density alien entity has lodged itself beneath the soil, simulating the mass of the vanished planet.

Trapped on the ranch, Hector is initially unbelieving. He spends his time wrapped up in rehashing paternal-filial dynamics and engaging in new psychodramas with his fellow castaways. He's always hoping for a return to the civilization he believes is lying undamaged outside the fog.

But then unearthly plants start sprouting from the soil, and some entity starts playing with Hector's brain.

Inner and outer landscapes merge

I've been championing the work of Adam Roberts since the appearance in 2000 of his first novel, Salt. He's a bold, meticulous, exciting U.K. writer with affinities to everyone from Stephen Baxter to Iain Banks, from Paul Park to Alistair Reynolds, from John Crowley to Thomas Disch. He blends literary excellence with strong speculative punch. But the U.S. audience has been deprived of his work until very recently, as his books inexplicably could not seem to secure publication here. Hopefully, with the arrival of the earlier Gradisil (2006), from Pyr, and this current book, Roberts is on his way to becoming a household word in America.

But Splinter, like the Verne novel that inspired it, is a bit laterally displaced from the Roberts canon. For one thing, it takes place in the present, whereas most books from Roberts inhabit a distant future. It also takes place on Earth, unlike the majority of his others. It's less recomplicated and dense, a tad cloistered. And finally, Roberts has adapted his style somewhat, choosing, as he says in a fascinating postscript essay on the origins of this novel, to emulate "Updike and Roth and DeLillo." (I myself hear existential and domestic echoes of Edward Albee and Samuel Beckett.)

But despite all those somewhat diminishing differences from Roberts' usual scope, the book does share with his other work a large central conceit vigorously plumbed for shattering emotional effects. As in some early Ballard catastophe, inner and outer geographies become merged and productively confused. A delicious sense of uncertainty about the nature of reality pervades the text.

Roberts' penchant for formalistic experimentation comes in the final sections, which are presented not as real-time narration but as an account of a vision Hector Junior is experiencing. When there's a vision within a vision, we get constructions like this: "He will ... have been being dreaming ... " The alienation from mundanity that is the thrust of this book, the implosion into epiphany, the rebirth of splinter and splintered, is complete.