Alastair Reynolds's Blog, page 33

Station Eleven

Christopher Priest has already given a far more eloquent appraisal of this novel than I am capable of - read his review here - but I cannot resist adding my own response. What a phenomenal book: beautiful, complex, haunting, humane, surprising at every turn, and so marvellously constructed that you hardly dare breathe. Like the best science fiction (I am not sure quite what I would call this book) it makes us see the world through fresh eyes, with a luminous new clarity.

The end of air travel...

Coming soon...

I published my first story in Interzone in 1990. Now it's 2015. I'm still here, and so is Interzone.
Coming up in IZ 257 will be my thirteenth story for the magazine.

What we call the "hut" is a couple of insulated portable cabins, with a few smaller sheds containing generators, fuel, wind turbine parts and so on. The main cabin contains a chemical toilet, a wash basin, basic cooking facilities and a set of bunk-beds. The second cabin holds our desks, computer equipment and supply...<![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]>

Asimov's Science Fiction - February 2015

Following my review of the January issue of Asimov's SF:

http://approachingpavonis.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/asimovs-science-fiction-january-2015.html

Let's have a look at the fiction in the February issue.







I was pleased to see a Michael Bishop novelette as the first piece in this issue. "Rattlesnakes and Men" has a characteristically well evoked Southern setting. Wylene, Reed and their daughter Celeste, made homeless after a tornado hits their town in Arkansas, hitch a trailer to their pick-up, lo...

Ender's Game (Gavin Hood, 2013)

Feeling the need for some space-based entertainment I caved in and bought the DVD of Ender's Game. I had not seen the film when it was released, and have read neither the Orson Scott Card novel nor the original, much-praised short story from which it was expanded. That said, it is impossible to exist in the SF world and not pick up the gist of the plot by osmosis. I had also read the sequel, Speaker to the Dead, during my student years, and rather enjoyed it at the time, although I don't reca...

The Quantika Trilogy

Later this year, a strikingly ambitious hard SF trilogy will reach its conclusion with the publication of the final volume. If I told you that the series features convincingly rendered exoplanetary locales, vast and perplexing alien artefacts, fractious political tensions between human explorers and settlers, plausibly extrapolated future technologies, a deft grasp of biology and physics, but also elegant writing, strongly evoked characters, and an immersive sense of place, then you'd probabl...

500 words

A couple of weeks ago I spent a day at my old school - Pencoed Comprehensive, near Bridgend - talking to students about creative writing. Part of the focus was on the BBC's "500 words" short story competition, which is currently running:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00rfvk1

Although I'm a little too old to enter the competition myself, I felt it would be a fun and instructive exercise to see what I could do given the same word-length constraint. I've done some vignettes before, but other th...

M42

A recent spell of clear skies had me returning to my lapsed interest in astrophotography. I've had the same telescope since about 1997 - a 9.25 inch Celestron Ultima - and while it doesn't have all the computerised bells and whistles of a modern GoTo scope, it serves me well and does everything I want it to. I don't have a dome or anything, so my scope has to live with me in my office until it's time to go and look at the stars. That means hefting the scope and tripod out in separate trips, b...

Asimov's Science Fiction - January 2015

I’ve never pretended to keep up with the short fiction field inside science fiction – let alone the all-encompassing genre of the fantastic – but there was a time when I did at least read all the magazines to which I subscribed, and also made an effort to digest the contents of the various Year’s Best anthologies when they came round. When I first subscribed to Interzone, a staggering thirty years ago, it was no problem at all to read each issue before the next arrived. I was a s...<![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]>

National Autistic Society

This saturday (17th January) I'll have the pleasure of speaking at AutismCon, the day-long Festival of the Mind organised by the National Autistic Society. The event takes place at Conway Hall, in central London. I'll be taking part in a panel discussion about science fiction, and speaking for about fifteen minutes about my own relationship to SF. The panel's scheduled to take place between 1.45 and 2.45, although it might be an idea to check the times on the day.

From the website:

"AutismCon...

Christmas University Challenge

Viewers in the UK should be able to catch me as part of the Newcastle team on tonight's edition of Christmas University Challenge.

BBC2 7.30pm - see how we did against Hull!