Alastair Reynolds's Blog, page 49

Skylon concept looks a bit like something from Gerry Anderson

Mention in the previous comments thread of the similarity between the ESA/UK Skylon concept and Fireball XL-5 reminded me of this even more striking similarity (basically the same concept, I think, just a few years back) with the doomed Fireflash atomic airliner:



Personally I think the world would be a better place if more stuff looked like it had come out of Gerry Anderson shows.

Let's just hope they can get the wheels down for landing, though. Curse that Hood!


Yes, it's a slow news day.

Current reading

I'm away from home at the moment, and have a book I need to read for review, so with regret (and not wanting to travel with two hefty hardbacks) I've had to set this aside until I return. It's a measure of the book that I can't wait to get back into it.






Mitchell is one of my favorite contemporary novelists, and Thousand Autumns ... doesn't disappoint. It's a mesmering window into a truly fascinating period - the dawn of the modern age - and a snapshot of the intersection of two radically diffe...

Terminal World on Wales Book of the Year shortlist

Delighted to report that Terminal World has made the shortlist for Wales Book of the Year 2011.

From the BBC Wales website:

"A poetry collection, travel novel and sci-fi story are among the works shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year.

The English-language titles are What the Water Gave Me by Pascale Petit, Cloud Road by John Harrison and Alastair Reynolds's Terminal World.

On the Welsh-language list are Caersaint by Angharad Price, Lladd Duw by Dewi Prysor and Bydoedd by Ned Thomas.

The winners i...

BRE, Troika etc

Yesterday I sent Blue Remembered Earth back to my publisher, after a substantial round of general cutting and tightening. The draft I submitted in December was 212,000 words; yesterday's was a much leaner 177,000. That's still a big book, of course, but it's comfortably shorter than anything I've done to date. 35,000 words, the difference between the two drafts, is about 100 pages of print, so we're talking about quite a substantial chunk of deleted material. It's never that simple, though, s...

TEDx, Wales Book of the Year

I got back from Oslo (which was great; thanks are due to my excellent hosts - especially Heidi Lyshol - for a very enjoyable visit) and then had to immediately dive into preparations for the TEDx Cardiff event on the coming weekend. As a consequence I'm still not up to date with everything, but bear with me.

TEDx was hugely enjoyable, if stressful. I've talked in public on many, many occasions, both as a scientist and writer, and to audiences large and small. By and large it doesn't bother me,...

Fantastic Voyage

While I'm in Oslo, here's a short essay I did for the BSFA on the film "Fantastic Voyage".



Its many flaws notwithstanding, I've always greatly enjoyed this film. It may well have been the first piece of cinematic SF I encountered - if it wasn't Fantastic Voyage, then it would have been another guilty pleasure, George Pal's 1960 version of The Time Machine. Both films loomed large in my childhood and their occasional appearance on television was always a source of delight.

Fantastic Voyage was d...

Next up

VS Ramachandran's Phantoms in the Brain was one of the best pop-science books I ever read, so I'm looking forward to getting stuck into this chunky summation of his work to date. He's an elegant and deeply humane writer, very much in the Oliver Sacks mode, and that's high praise as far as I'm concerned.


Ramachandran's work on mirror boxes and phantom limb syndrome is fascinating; fans of House MD will remember the episode "The Tyrant" where House (after first drugging and kidnapping him) treat...

The Cold Ten Thousand

This is my current bedside reading:


I'd had a glance at Daniel Levitin's book in a Boston bookstore last year, but for some reason hadn't bought it; I don't know why as this is exactly my kind of thing. Perhaps I was thinking about luggage allowance on my flight home. In the end I picked up a copy a few weeks ago in Cardiff, and it's very interesting stuff, both in the specifics of its theme - the science of music perception and appreciation, and as a handy primer on recent developments in neu...

Celebrity Swears

Naughty but funny spoof video of Brian Cox - contains lots of gratuitous swearing, obviously a good thing in my book but possibly offensive to some:



(Thanks to Jetse de Vries for alerting me to this).

Midlake - Roscoe

This is bloody fantastic.