Alastair Reynolds's Blog, page 18

Another gratuitous frog

I'm quite enjoying a bit of late-evening frog photography. There's a window of about 10 minutes around dusk between the frogs emerging, and my autofocus not being able to work due to the low light levels. Flash penetrates beneath the water level quite nicely, since all I could (just about) see of this fellow was the top of his head.

On writing

In an earlier comment, Hristo Naydenov asked:

I don't wanna be a nuisance, but as someone who wants to write sci-fi, I find it quite difficult to figure out how to start. Maybe the foundation doesn't have to be a truly original concept, but the development that follows has to be. Where did you get your inspiration from? How do you start writing something so amazing? Do you start off based on a single, simple idea, and build as you go, or do you have a big outline that depicts everything that you ...

Six spot burnet

A nice day-flying moth. Dyffryn Gardens, South Wales.

Freddo

Jeremy, Kermit and Freddo

Spot the frogs...

Welcome, Fand

A multiplanet system of super-Earths orbiting the brightest red dwarf star GJ 887

(aka Lacaille 9352, location of Fand in the Revelation Space books).

For the last decade or so it's been obvious that there'll come a point (if it hasn't already happened) where our knowledge of exoplanets conflicts with the alien solar system worldbuilding in the RS series, which has its origins in stories written more than thirty years ago. Given how little we ever expected to know about exoplanets when I started s...

Don't say we weren't warned

From a remarkable piece in The Guardian by Celina Ribeiro, which you can read here:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/28/beyond-google-my-afternoon-trawling-trove-for-the-first-mentions-of-climate-change

"COAL CONSUMPTION AFFECT-
ING CLIMATE.
The furnaces of the world are now
burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of
coal a year. When this is burned,
uniting with oxygen, it adds about
7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide
to the atmosphere yearly. This tends
to make the air a more effective blan-
ket for...

Two online things and Jeremy

Here in lockdown (we're still in it in Wales) I've done more than the usual number of online interviews and appearances. Each has been enjoyable; each a privilege, each has probably had me scrambling around at the last minute in a sweaty tizz trying to get something to work which definitely worked the last time I tried it. A particular and much treasured highlight was snapping the clip on my webcam 30 minutes before I was due to go live. Thank goodness for superglue and duct tape.

The first of th...

Hands off

From The Guardian:

The family of Tom Petty has issued a formal cease and desist letter to the Donald Trump campaign over its use of his song I Won’t Back Down at a rally in Tulsa on 20 June.

Full story:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/jun/21/tom-petty-estate-issues-cease-and-desist-over-trump-use-of-song

I loved Tom Petty's recordings and was shocked and saddened when he died. He was an astonishing songwriter and performer, but he also had time for his fans. When I was on Twitter, one of my m...

Q&A with Adrian Tchaikovsky - back on June 24th

The postponed event mentioned in previous posts is now back on for June 24th.

If it's of interest, register here:

https://www.crowdcast.io/e/reynolds-tchaikovsky-jun2020/register