Alastair Reynolds's Blog, page 29

Royal Society science books

Today sees the release of the shortlist for the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book prize for 2016, for which I was one of the judges. The shortlisted titles are:
The Most Perfect Thing by Tim Birkhead (Bloomsbury)The Hunt for Vulcan by Thomas Levenson (Head of Zeus)Cure by Jo Marchant (Canongate)The Planet Remade by Oliver Morton (Granta)The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee (Bodley Head)The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf (John Murray)
It was a pleasure - and a considerable challenge...

REVENGER - two sketches and an excerpt

REVENGER will appear in a little under six weeks, so I thought I'd post another excerpt and a couple of sketches from my working notebook.
In the extract, the two recently hired sisters - Fura and Adrana Ness - are getting their first taste of working in the Bone Room of the sunjammer Monetta's Mourn.






Cazaray spun the wheel that opened the door to the bone room.

‘Go in,’ he said quietly. ‘Just don’t touch anything – for now.’

Adrana went in first. I followed on her heels, taking care never to los...

Star Trek Beyond

After the disappointment of the confused, incoherent Star Trek: Into Darkness, Star Trek Beyond is at least a film that can be enjoyed on a surface level without too many objections. I confess that I'm not a huge fan of the rebooted series as a whole, finding the films to be visually spectacular, excellently cast, genuinely moving and/or funny in places, but otherwise shallow, with gaping inconsistencies in basic plot logic - a failing I also found in the first of the new Star Wars films, whi...

Beyond the Aquila Rift is out

Today sees the UK publication of my huge Best Of collection, "Beyond the Aquila Rift" - around two hundred and fifty thousand words of short fiction, plus exclusive story notes. Here's the UK cover:



And here's a link to the Amazon page for the book:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Beyond-Aquila-Rift-Alastair-Reynolds/dp/1473216362

None of this would have happened without the indefatigable efforts of Jonathan Strahan and Bill Schafer, who worked together to produce the Subterranean Press edition, which...

Slow Bullets wins Locus award

Although I couldn't be there in person, I was delighted with the news that Slow Bullets had won the novella category in this year's Locus awards, held in Seattle. I've never won a Locus award before, although I did get close with Revelation Space, so this was doubly welcome, especially as I've always found the Locus staff to be excellent company.

Locus has the complete breakdown of results:
http://www.locusmag.com/News/2016/06/2016-locus-awards-winners/
Congratulations to all.
And here's a photo...

Why I'm for the UK remaining in the EU

In a very short while the UK will be holding a referendum on the country's continued membership of the EU. At the moment, judged on the polls (which are of course often inaccurate, as with the last general election), things seem to be heading the way of a vote to leave.

I think it would be a great shame were this to happen. As a young scientist, I benefitted tremendously from the freedom of movement allowed within the EU. I'm not talking about my time within the European Space Agency, which is...

Medusa Chronicles at Foyles

"Saturday 4th June 2016 3pm - 4:30pm 107 Charing Cross Road Literary Event, Chargeable Event
In association with The Arthur C. Clarke Award and SFX Magazine.


Join us for a conversation with two leading figures in science fiction, Alastair Reynolds and Stephen Baxter, as they discuss their new collaboration The Medusa Chronicles. Inspired by the classic Sir Arthur C. Clarke's short story ‘A Meeting with Medusa’, The Medusa Chronicles continues the story of Commander Howard Falcon over centuries...

Galaxy Quest

At last, an image of M101. This is a quick and dirty stack of six ten minute sub-frames, aligned using Photoshop. There is a lot of electronic noise in the frames which I would like to remove.



A pass through http://nova.astrometry.net/ confirms the pointing:


And here's a crop, with some contrast tweaking, of the galaxy itself:


The string of stars in the lower left corner (and elsewhere) is the result of individual hot pixels being shifted and duplicated as I did the manual alignment. T...

Slow Bullets on the Hugo ballot

A couple of weeks ago I was contacted by the Hugo administrators to let me know that my novella "Slow Bullets" would be one of the finalists in that category. I was pleased, but not without some obvious misgivings. I'd been unhappy about the inclusion of my story on the recommendation lists of the Sad and Rabid Puppies, especially given that the latter was to all intents just another slate, designed to encourage block voting. At the time no one really had a clear idea about how dominant the P...

Pattern Recognition

Technology marches on. Sometimes I find myself caught entirely unawares by some capability which not only works flawlessly, but which has become almost freely available to the consumer or enthusiastic amateur. I still remember buying a digital SLR camera which had face recognition built in almost as an afterthought. I'd given it no great thought until - with the camera sitting powered-up on a coffee table - I noticed that it was locking in on the picture of the queen's head on a five pound no...