Alastair Reynolds's Blog, page 42

New Art Riot: Tug on this

Felt tip sketch, after an original pencil drawing by Frank Rines.

Silent Running

(This short piece on the film Silent Running appeared in Cinema Futura, edited by Mark Morris, in 2010.)


In the future, some kind of catastrophe – planned or otherwise - has befallen Earth's once great natural environments. All that's left is a handful of domed preserves, drifting through the solar system attached like glistening seed pods to huge skeletal space freighters. After the order arrives to jettison the forests, blow them up with nuclear bombs, and return the ships to commercial use...

Presented without comment

One of my first record purchases. A snip at 1.49p.

Blue tit

Blue tit asleep in the nest box my wife and I put up last year. First resident we've had. Crappy picture, I know. Will try a better one later.

Edit: here's a second shot, still fuzzy, but you can see the head:

Shine like an Arc Light

Today is the scheduled launch day of ARC, New Scientist's ambitious new SF/Futurism magazine - think OMNI updated for 2012. The magazine is mainly an e-reader publication, although I understand that there will be a limited number of print editions.

Some information:

http://arcfinity.tumblr.com/

I presume at some point there will be a link to ARC's purchase and download options.

My story "The Water Thief" appears in the first issue, which also includes stories and features from Margaret Atwood, Ch...

Jupiter

I had another go tonight. I set my scope up at 6.00 pm and was onto Jupiter very quickly. The first thing I did was make sure I was definitely saving files. I then had a look in the camera configuration and was able to turn the gain down to the point where I could begin to see detail on the planet, although at the expense of no longer being able to see the moons. I took many similar looking frames over the next hour, while clouds rolled in and away. This is one of the frames; I've cropped it ...

Astrophotography

So I'm trying to get into astrophotography. I thought it might be worthwhile to document my progress here, successes and failures both. We'll begin, predictably enough, with ignominious failure. But first a bit of background.

I was a professional astronomer for a large chunk of my life. I studied astronomy, gained a PhD (in the course of which I wrote and published three papers on the velocities of binary stars). After that, I worked in Holland. Apart from a two-year stint at Utrecht Universit...

Emails

Over the last week I've had a substantial catch-up on unanswered emails but if you are still waiting for one (and I know many are), please hang in there. As always I am grateful for correspondence, even if I'm not the most efficient at replying in a timely fashion.

The SFX Weekender

I spent the weekend in Prestatyn, along with about six thousand other people, attending the third SFX Weekender. This was my first time at an SFX event, and also the first time I'd been anywhere near what might be termed a "media" convention - certainly a world away from my experiences at Eastercon, or indeed almost any of the more literary-orientated events in the SF calendar, which tend to the "low key" end of things. Even the Worldcon, which has its share of costumers and VIP guests, could...

Forbidden Planet

I'll be signing in London's Forbidden Planet tomorrow between 4 and 5pm. Hope to see some of you there.

http://forbiddenplanet.com/events/2012/01/21/alastair-reynolds-signing-blue-remembered-earth/

Meanwhile, a reminder that you can read a little bit about the book, as well as the prologue and first three chapters, over at the http://www.gollancz.co.uk/.

This week's progress: 11,000 words on the new book.