Alastair Reynolds's Blog

I met Rob Holdstock for the first time in 1991, at the Harrogate Mexicon, the first convention I attended. Although I'd published a couple of stories in Interzone, and sold a couple more, I was still pretty much a nobody as far as the wider SF world was concerned. Despite this, Rob Holdstock (who was at the bar with Chris Evans) bought me a pint and talked to me like I was one of the gang. I never forgot that. I was out of the country for most of the next 18 years so we only met on a couple o...

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I'm back. Many thanks for all the emails - I am slowly beginning to return to some kind of normal activity and will be responding in due course. They were all hugely appreciated during a difficult time.

OK - some time ago I mentioned one or two stories I had been working on, and alluded to one without saying anything about the title or destination of the finished work. I can now reveal to an anxiously waiting world that the story in question is entitled "At Budokan" and has been accepted for p...

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Good to see the Ares 1-X rolled out of the VAB today. I just hope there's some money in the pot to actually do something with it. I'm all for the Ares program, even if in many ways it looks like a throwback to the Apollo era (and in terms of some of the hardware, that's pretty much what it is). Granted, it would have been nice if the shuttle concept could have been evolved, rather than (as it seems to me) largely discarded. Perhaps we'll come back to reusable spaceplanes later in the...

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I lost my father last week so please bear with me until I'm back up to speed around these parts. Obviously not the best of times, but I'm fortunate to have a wonderful wife and family around me, not to mention many good friends.

I've disabled comments for now, not realising that this would delete all existing comments in previous entries. However it may well be that I keep it this way from now on, as I wasn't brilliant at responding to comments to begin with, and - let's face it - this isn't r...

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I've had to pull out of the Oktoberfest event in Greenwich (see September 11th post). Apologies to all concerned, and also for my lack of presence around these parts and general slowness in replying to email correspondence. I prefer to keep the really personal stuff out of my blog but a close relative is very ill and this has been necessarily overshadowing other activities. Thanks!

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Apologies for my absence here these last few weeks. Thanks to everyone who came along to the talk at Greenwich, and to those who made the trek to Bristol. It was a most enjoyable way to spend half a day and I know everyone came away very enthused by the idea of doing something similar next year. All credit to the organisers both for making things run smoothly, and for picking such an excellent venue.

It's been a busy few weeks, for various reasons. By now word seems to be out on the street...

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Four things I should have mentioned sooner:

On Tuesday September 15th I'll be talking on the subject of science anfd science fiction (with the slant on astronomy) at the Royal Observatory Greenwich. My talk runs between 7pm and 8.30pm and admission costs eight pounds.

On saturday September 26th I'll be guest of honour at Bristolcon, a small, one-day convention being staged by the Bristol Fantasy and SF Society at Mercure Holland House Hotel and Spa, Redcliffe Hill (not far from Bristol Temple ...

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It's been nearly another month, hasn't it. Sorry all. Really I've just had my head down, getting on with stuff. Edits and queries on TW, including about 12,000 words of last minute additions and substitutions. A new story done and dusted, and another finished today, both novellettes (although at 17,000 words today's is nudging into short novella territory). Both stories, incidentally, are set on Earth - no spaceships! More on these in due course. I need to write at least one more story this y...

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A friend asked if all was well, given the lack of updates here recently. Sorry for that. There's absolutely nothing wrong, it's just that I've been busy with various activities and beyond the mere fact of being busy, which isn't itself very interesting, there's been precious little to report. A round of last minute rewrites on bits of TW, faltering progress on book 1 of 11K, a short story with dinosaurs in it, with two more (not with dinosaurs) to finish by the end of the year. If this sounds li

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Well I sort of nearly did it, if you accept "by the 20th" to mean "on the 20th" in the UK, and if you allow for painting and some details still be completed (like the entire LM). But anyway, I've got to the top and barring some details on the second stage, the Saturn is more or less complete externally. I've made a start on the "black bits", as we scientists call them, but here the Revell painting guides seem to be way off, so I'm referring to photographs. There's a tiny 1/96th astronaut in the

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