Alastair Reynolds's Blog, page 35

Two Trunks

According to popular wisdom, all writers have at least one early and unpublished book that is best consigned to obscurity - the so called "trunk novel", the idea being that you keep it locked away in a trunk rather than doing the sensible thing and binning it. According to another branch of popular wisdom, the first thing writers do when they're stuck for inspiration is dust off a trunk novel and pass it off as a fresh new book. I'm sure that happens occasionally, but I suspect the truth is t...

Incoming

ON THE STEEL BREEZE is only ten days from UK publication, and at least one bookseller seems to have copies in stock already, although they may not yet be for sale. Having just returned from America, and with my post still to be collected from my neighbour, it's entirely possible that there might be a finished copy in my mail as well. I'll find out soon enough. It's always a sobering moment, the first time you hold the end product. Months or years of work, distilled into a rectangle of card an...

Remember the Alamo

I enjoyed the World Science Fiction Convention in San Antonio. As always, I'm left with slightly mixed feelings about what I expect to get out of such a gathering, as well as what I'm actually bringing to the show by being there. But there's no doubt that from my perspective as a writer and program participant, it all seemed well organised. The convention centre was, from a British viewpoint, typically huge and at times bewildering in its layout. I never did make it to the Green Room. But the...

Chiefly nocturnal

Eagle Owl caption, Field museum of natural history, Chicago. I have no idea why the upright image insists on displaying like this, but I'll fix it when I return to the UK. Among many things about the wonderful Field museum, I loved that they had made no attempt to update the dated diction and tone of their older captions. I wish more museums kept faith with the past in this fashion, rather than constantly chasing an ever decreasing attention span. "This results in the discomfiture of the owl"...

ISS

Unless you're on it, the International Space Station is a long way away - 400 or more km, even if it's flying right overhead - but on the other hand, it's huge. Modern digital cameras and lenses can do surprisingly well at capturing images of such a large and distant object, so - having been impressed by some of the pictures I've seen on the web - I thought I'd have a go myself.

This is my first proper effort -I tried a couple of nights ago with my camera on automatic mode, but the battery was...

Grrrr

My story "At Budokan", which originally appeared in Jetse de Vries's Shine anthology, is now available to read for free in Lightspeed magazine:

http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/at-budokan/

Mural and Year's Best

I was delighted to hear from Dakota Freeman, a physics and mathematics undergraduate at MIT. Dakota tells me that they're allowed to paint more or less whatever they like on the dorm walls, which strikes me as a great concept. For Dakota's dorm the inspiration came from the cover of my collection Zima Blue and Other Stories. Says Dakota: "I particularly enjoyed "Fresco" and "Tiger, Burning", though my favorite story of yours is definitely "House of Suns."

A person of taste and refinement, I th...

From sketch to cover

Everyone loved the hardback cover of Blue Remembered Earth by Dominic Harman (me especially), but for the smaller format required for the paperback edition, it was felt that a significant redesign was needed, together with a visual element that emphasized the space-based action of much of the book. In other words, another spaceship.

There is no one spaceship that dominates the action in BRE - I actually tried to make the various craft more like routine vehicles than major characters in their o...

Eagles High

Eagle, the hugely popular children's comic, casts a very long shadow. In its original incarnation it ran from 1950 to 1969. Its golden age, however, was even shorter than that, for by the mid sixties the comic (which was always aimed squarely at boys) was struggling to find its place in a world of television, pop music and a new era of global sport.

Yet the reach of the magazine was huge, and there must be countless children who came to a knowledge of Eagle not through the comic itself, but th...

The Foss Way

Over at http://www.unlikelyworlds.blogspot.co.uk/ Paul McAuley has been posting some classic 70s paperback SF images, many of which are by the incomparable Chris Foss. These days, it's perhaps hard to grasp the extent to which the spaceship-orientated visual style of Chris Foss was absolutely inseparable from SF, to the extent that many of the other artists of the period were obliged to emulate the Foss look. I adored Foss's work even as I came to the sobering conclusion that most of the imag...