Alastair Reynolds's Blog, page 51

Seasons greetings

Back

Sorry about the lack of updates around here. I've just delivered a novel, so normal service (or what passes for it) will resume very shortly. Cheers!

new blog

New blog:

Approaching Pavonis

Not much there yet, but it's early days.

Teahouse foreclosure notice

I'm abandoning this blog, but not for any apocalyptic reasons. I've decided to start a new one which will hopefully be less clunky to maintain. I will post a link here when the new blog is active.

In the meantime, I've overhauled the website:

www.alastairreynolds.com

and made a note on the site to the effect that I won't be (and never was going to be) attending the SFX Weekender, even though I seem be listed here and there as a guest.

Rob Holdstock

I met Rob Holdstock for the first time in 1991, at the Harrogate Mexicon, the first convention I attended. Although I'd published a couple of stories in Interzone, and sold a couple more, I was still pretty much a nobody as far as the wider SF world was concerned. Despite this, Rob Holdstock (who was at the bar with Chris Evans) bought me a pint and talked to me like I was one of the gang. I never forgot that. I was out of the country for most of the next 18 years so we only met on a couple o...

The light of good works shine

I'm back. Many thanks for all the emails - I am slowly beginning to return to some kind of normal activity and will be responding in due course. They were all hugely appreciated during a difficult time.

OK - some time ago I mentioned one or two stories I had been working on, and alluded to one without saying anything about the title or destination of the finished work. I can now reveal to an anxiously waiting world that the story in question is entitled "At Budokan" and has been accepted for p...

Ares 1-X rollout

Good to see the Ares 1-X rolled out of the VAB today. I just hope there's some money in the pot to actually do something with it. I'm all for the Ares program, even if in many ways it looks like a throwback to the Apollo era (and in terms of some of the hardware, that's pretty much what it is). Granted, it would have been nice if the shuttle concept could have been evolved, rather than (as it seems to me) largely discarded. Perhaps we'll come back to reusable spaceplanes later in the...

Still more

I lost my father last week so please bear with me until I'm back up to speed around these parts. Obviously not the best of times, but I'm fortunate to have a wonderful wife and family around me, not to mention many good friends.

I've disabled comments for now, not realising that this would delete all existing comments in previous entries. However it may well be that I keep it this way from now on, as I wasn't brilliant at responding to comments to begin with, and - let's face it - this isn't r...

More stuff

I've had to pull out of the Oktoberfest event in Greenwich (see September 11th post). Apologies to all concerned, and also for my lack of presence around these parts and general slowness in replying to email correspondence. I prefer to keep the really personal stuff out of my blog but a close relative is very ill and this has been necessarily overshadowing other activities. Thanks!

Catching up

Apologies for my absence here these last few weeks. Thanks to everyone who came along to the talk at Greenwich, and to those who made the trek to Bristol. It was a most enjoyable way to spend half a day and I know everyone came away very enthused by the idea of doing something similar next year. All credit to the organisers both for making things run smoothly, and for picking such an excellent venue.

It's been a busy few weeks, for various reasons. By now word seems to be out on the street...