Alastair Reynolds's Blog, page 31

Star Wars

Over on File770, there's been some discussion about the way the SF community responded to Star Wars when it came out in 1977:

http://file770.com/?p=25931

Personally, I loved Star Wars with every beat of my heart and still do. What's often forgotten is that, over in the UK, we didn't get the film until early in 1978. I saw it on my twelth birthday, in Swansea, and I can still recollect pretty much every detail of both the film and the drive to and from it along the M4, past the alien nightscape...

Asimovs - April/May 2015 double issue

As I alluded to in my review of the June issue, I had to set this one aside for the time being due to losing my physical copy of the magazine. I'd been reading it during a trip to Geekopolis, the big multimedia comvention in Paris, and to the best of my recollection I must have set it down on a table during an interview and then left it there. Sheila Williams, the editor of Asimov's, very kindly sent me a pdf of the edition but that brought its own complications. I could only read it on a lap...

Russia

Looking down Nevsky Prospekt, St Petersburg, on a cloudless late summer evening.


So I went to Russia, and it was great.

I was invited to be a guest at the Saint Petersburg Science Fiction Assembly, a small but friendly gathering of fans taking place in mid August. It came at the end of an exceptionally busy summer for me, the culmination of a year in which, at one point at least, I had been working on three novels at the same time. By August I had thinned that down to just the one novel, but I...

Asimovs - June 2015

At the start of the year I began reviewing 2015's run of Asimov's Science Fiction, but I was careful not to make any rash promises about delivering those reviews in anything like a timely fashion. My efforts to read the April/May double issue came acropper when I lost my copy of the magazine in Paris, and although editor Sheila Williams very kindly sent me a pdf of the issue, for various boring technical reasons, I can only read pdfs in my office - and I've had a novel to finish in the meanti...

Slow Bullets and the Canopus Award.

A week or two ago I was very pleased to learn that Slow Bullets had been shortlisted for the inaugural Canopus Award:

http://100yss.org/news/press

I was asked not to release the news until the 100 Year Starship organisation had put out its own press release about the shortlisting.

Unfortunately, I missed an important detail. Slow Bullets had been nominated in the long-form category, and I failed to notice that the cutoff was for works longer than 40,000 words. Slow Bullets is actually a bit unde...

Tomislav Tikulin

Tomislav Tikulin is a Croatian artist who has just had his first book published, by SST press. If you've been collecting some of my limited editions and chapbooks, you'll have already encountered Tomislav's fine work on the covers of Troika, Thousandth Night and so on.


I liked Tomislav's work from the outset, and when SST asked me for a quote for the new book, I was happy to provide an endorsement, of which this is a partial quote:

"It's been my great privilege to see Tomislav's artwork illust...

Frank Sidebottom and the Snows of Pluto

One of my most treasured posessions is this record from 1986, Frank Sidebottom's epoch-defining "sci-fi ep":


Other than containing some of the most inspired interpretations of popular sci-fi themes ever committed to vinyl - Frank's 2-second long "The Theme Tune from Close Encounters of the Third Kind" is particularly noteworthy -  Frank was thoughtful enough to include some cutting edge "science fact". Here's the rear cover:






Among other choice factoids, Frank informs us that the Sun is "ve...

Books, books, books

Not a great deal to report here, hence the silence. But that doesn't mean it hasn't been a busy month or so since the last update.

Steve Baxter and I delivered our collaborative novel - the sequel to Arthur C Clarke's "A Meeting with Medusa" - at the start of June. At the moment we're to-ing and fro-ing between "The Medusa Chronicles" and "The Medusa Centuries" for the title, but that should be settled before too long. At various points Steve and I have used both titles, but we were always awa...

Slow Bullets

Tomorrow is the official publication day of my chapbook novella "Slow Bullets", which I'm very pleased to have published with Tachyon Press, ably assisted by my editor on the project, Marty Halpern. At just a shade under 40,000 words, it's not quite novel-length by the usual rules, but it is certainly at the long end of short fiction.

Like many of my stories, this one had a very long gestation. For several years I'd been playing around with two completely separate story ideas. The first concer...

The same old same old

I got quite an interesting email from a reader a few days ago. Here's a quote:

 I have some questions about your work that have been bugging me for a long time. In your Poseidon's Children books, your style of writing appears to me to be markedly different from those of your short stories and the Revelation Space books; notably, that it shys away from the technical detail and minutia seen in your Revolution Space literature. I was wondering why this was, because that detail (like Skade's...