Alastair Reynolds's Blog, page 45

Solaris Rising

It's a terrible and beautiful thing I've done.

I suppose I already had it in mind, when the last uplink came in. Not that I'd come close to voicing the possibility to myself. If I'd been honest about the course I was on, I might well have requested immediate committal to stasis.

The right thing to do, in hindsight. And maybe we'd be on our way home now, back to the gratitude of a thousand worlds. Our house would have crumbled into the sea by the time we got back. But we could always have built ...

Cloud Restructured Earth

Word frequency cloud for a large chunk of BLUE REMEMBERED EARTH, via tagcrowd.com.




akinya along already anything around asked aug away bad best better beyond body box brother business chama chinese ching couldn course cousins didn different doesn don done earth elephants else enough eunice eyes family far felt finger follow geoffrey give gleb glove going ground hands happened head hector household human hundred isn jitendra knew life light looked lucas lunar machines man matilda maybe memphis ...

Elephant Talk

You'll have likely seen this already but here's the cover of the new book:


I'm delighted with it; I think it does a fabulous job of not only capturing the main themes of Blue Remembered Earth, but also of hinting at the elements (should that be elephants?) that will come to play an increasingly significant role in the successive books. And the colours are gorgeous. I've seen a door-sized blow-up of this cover and it's a thing of real beauty.

As for the next book, I'm well into it. It's a skewed...

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Can the Camm

This man:


Contributed to the design of this:


The Hawker P1127, prototype for the Harrier jump jet, the AV-8B derivatives of which were still being manufactured in 2003, and remain in service.

Camm also designed the RAF's first monoplane, the Hawker Hurricane. Not bad for a career...

Fifty years (redux)

As a science fiction writer, I'm as equally interested in the stuff that won't change, as the stuff that will. Many of the technologies in our day to day lives are ephemeral: my camera is not the same one I had ten years ago. My television is not the same one. My main car is not the same one (although we still own one made in 1989; we just don't drive it anywhere). My kettle is not the same one. My mobile phone is not even the same one I had two years ago. My PC is nine years old, but that's ...

Fifty years

I wrote Pushing Ice in 2005, setting the main action in 2057 - a little over fifty years from the time of writing. When I started developing the book, mid way through 2004, the story took place a good century further into the future. But I quickly got bogged down in stuff that, while interesting, was a sideline to the main event - this rapidly moving tale of space exploration and first contact. By moving the action much closer to the present, I was free to assume that a lot of stuff had not c...

Check one, check two

Atul Gawande is one of my favorite non-fiction writers. A surgeon, he writes with unsparing honesty and insight about the realities of modern day medical treatment - with particular emphasis on the things we get wrong, and the things that, with little effort, we could easily improve. I picked up his first book, Complications (2002), in a Boston airport bookstore and found it compulsive and fascinating. I'm a sucker for medical case histories, especially when they're recounted in such lucid, h...

Elevation

I remember (or think I remember) reading a description of Colson Whitehead's first novel over on Rick Kleffel's The Agony Column. At the time, as is so often the case, I thought "wow, that sounds right up my street ..." and then promptly forgot all about it. The Intuitionist appeared in 1999, so I'm guessing I heard about the book around ten years ago, give or take. I should pay more attention: it was on Rick's site, for instance, that I first saw mention of David Mitchell's first novel.



In th...

Website

Just a minor heads up to say that I've given the website a dust over and will be looking at adding some additional content over coming weeks. Not sure how many people actually read author websites these days, but hopefully there's some vaguely useful stuff there. As always, I'm not looking for help with running or designing the site (I know it's not slick, but that's kind of the point - it's mine, all mine, and has been for 16 years), but any suggestions will be taken on onboard.

www...