Alastair Reynolds's Blog, page 40

Sheep at the price

Not the promised blog post on spaceflight, but some scenery instead.






Wales, Brecon Beacons, October 27th 2012. Not quite the view from my office, but not far off.

Engagement

The debate sparked by Paul Kincaid's essay on SF's state of exhaustion rolls on. Here, for instance, is PK's latest statement - it's well worth reading, and also includes a handy set of links to some of the other contributions to the dialogue.

It's always hard to know how to engage with this sort of thing. As writers, we are strongly discouraged from responding to our critics, advice which I think is eminently sensible and which I have tried to abide by. Even the simple act of linking to or me...

Glasnost

You might not think it, and some of my critics will be laughing into their cornflakes at this point, but I spend quite a bit of time thinking about prose. It's fair to say that a sizable proportion of science fiction readers don't much care, or at least don't think that they care. Read a sample of amazon reviews of science fiction novels - in fact, a more general sample of web reviews will do just as nicely - and you'll find a lot of stuff about the plot being interesting, the characters lika...

On Mediocrity

It's been said, with some truth, that SF writers have given up thinking seriously about the near future. The problem, so the commonplace wisdom goes, is that so many elements of the real world are now changing so rapidly, and so unpredictably, that there's no sense of a clear path before us. By contrast, writers used to have it a lot easier in the past. They could see the way things were going, they could sense the winds of change. The pace of technological and social change was quickening, b...

It was twenty years ago today

Well, not quite. But we are now in the autumn of 2012 and in the autumn of 1992 - rather astonishingly, twenty years ago - I started writing Revelation Space. Not some remote ancestor of that book, either, but the thing itself. I had made a number of false starts on a book with similar themes and (in some cases) exactly similar characters and situations, but all of these had come to naught. By 1992, though, I had achieved enough domestic stability that I was finally able to carve out the nece...

Exhaust gases

As I mentioned in the previous post, the critic Paul Kincaid has recently ignited a debate about the perceived state of exhaustion of science fiction. It's worth reading PK's original review, and the subsequent interview relating to it, and worth also taking a look at Jonathan McCalmont's lengthy (and broadly supportive) response. PK confines his focus to short fiction - indeed, he does not appear to regard novel length SF to be suffering from quite such a serious malaise - but JM's complaint...

Breaking cover

A few brief things ... I'm deep in novel work at the moment, and will remain so for some while, so I'd like to apologise for my continued tardiness in responding to emails. I know I say this all the time, but (as I hope some of you will be aware) I do have a big catch-up every few months, and will strive to do so again.

Secondly, last week's Google event went very well, in my experience, and if nothing else it was terrific fun to hang out with Peter and Iain, albeit briefly. Even if you're not...

Google+ event, 27th September

While I surface from work on ON THE STEEL BREEZE, just a word to say that I'll be participating in a three-way Google+ hangout with Iain M Banks and Peter F Hamilton. The event takes place next week, on Thursday 27th September. Here's some information:

https://plus.google.com/events/cb7crmu7lceqku24v6t0jn4a3r8

Now, as far as I understand it, this is not a public event in the sense that you can show up in London when we do it. But via the medium of Google+ you can still participate. In fact some...

Two things

Couple of items worth mentioning - I've just done a lengthy podcast interview with Wired.com, which is available here, together with a useful transcript:

 http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/09/geeks-guide-alastair-reynolds

Thank you to John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley for giving me the opportunity to talk.

Elsewhere, there is now a fan forum for all things to do with my work, with a strong focus on the Revelation Space universe. The forum is nothing to do with me, but I wish it wel...

Mystery house

While I get my act in gear for a proper series of posts, here's a quiz for you. I recently photographed this property. It's the fictional home of a long-running British TV character - anyone recognise it? The series is also aired in the States - in fact, I first saw it in America.


No prize, other than the vast satisfaction of identifying it.

Edit - well, that didn't take long. But have a few more photos from the same location. Here's Bert Large's restaurant:


And here's another of the Doc's house...