Alastair Reynolds's Blog, page 22

Recent things

I'm pleased to have sold a new story, "Polished Performance", to Jonathan Strahan's forthcoming anthology of robot stories, Made to Order, which will appear in 2020.




Although it's a relatively short 7500 words, it remains the only piece of short fiction I've completed since Permafrost, itself a novella. Once I had Permafrost off my desk, I dived into the third Revenger book, Bone Silence, and that took care of all my writing for the rest of 2018 and a serious chunk of 2019 as well. The novel w...

Because why not.

What the IF

Last week I had the great pleasure of taking part in the excellent What the IF podcast, hosted by Philip Shane and Matt Stanley. The starting point for our discussion was my story "Different Seas", which appeared in MIT Press's Twelve Tomorrows anthology, and the immersive telepresence technology that the story features.
Here's a link to the What the IF homepage:
https://whattheif.com/
and here's a direct link to my episode:
https://whattheif.com/episodes/2019/6/24/living-inside-the-big-bang-zf66...

Vassal states

Far from being a "vassal state" of the EU, as Boris Johnson would have it, it increasingly feels to me as if the UK is a vassal state of Eton. Who was the architect of the referendum? A gammon-faced Etonian. Who were some of the strongest voices behind the leave campaign? Etonians. Who's just slimed his way to the top of the pole? An Etonian. I write in advance of Boris Johnson's coronation but there seems no chance at all that he will not be selected.

For one brief shining moment I thought th...

Saturn V

Those of you who were reading my blog ten years ago (back when it was "Teahouse on the Tracks") may remember that I decided to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Apollo 11 by building a Saturn V rocket.

I started with the 1/96th scale Revell kit, re-released in 2009! It's actually about as old as the Apollo program itself, and because it was tooled-up slightly ahead of the missions themselves, it's supposedly not quite accurate for Apollo 11.

Looks good enough to me, though:



Although I buil...

Gene Wolfe 1931 - 2019

Gene Wolfe has died.

I feel I ought to say more, but it's late and I'm tired. I'll leave it with this: it took me years to find a way into his work, but once I did, I was never the same again. He changed me as a writer and, I think, a human being. I never met him properly (although we did once participate in a panel via video link) but I got to write about him a few times, and his passing leaves us immeasurably poorer.


Thank you, Mr Wolfe.

Titans of Sci-Fi event

On the 18th of April I'll be in Waterstones Picadilly in London, talking SF with Temi Oh and Emma Newman, with Pat Cadigan (rather than Gavin Smith as originally announced) chairing our conversation.I thoroughly enjoyed Planetfall, Emma's first SF novel (and am now catching up with her other works, including the newly-released Atlas Alone) and I was greatly impressed with Temi's debut, which is a powerful meditation on the consequences of leaving home. Decades-long interstellar voyages featur...

Did anyone see a knight pass this way?

Envy me

Or not, as the case may be.

Out now

Permafrost, my new novella from Tor books, is published today.


Here's the description:

Fix the past. Save the present. Stop the future. Master of science fiction Alastair Reynolds unfolds a time-traveling climate fiction adventure in Permafrost.

2080: at a remote site on the edge of the Arctic Circle, a group of scientists, engineers and physicians gather to gamble humanity's future on one last-ditch experiment. Their goal: to make a tiny alteration to the past, averting a global catastrophe whi...