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Alastair Preston Reynolds (born in 1966 in Barry, South Wales) is a Welsh science fiction author. He specialises in dark hard science fiction and space opera. He spent his early years in Cornwall, moved back to Wales before going to Newcastle, where he read Physics and Astronomy. Afterwards, he earned a PhD from St Andrews, Scotland. In 1991, he moved to Noordwijk in the Netherlands where he met his wife Josette (who is from France). There, he worked for the European Space Research and Technology Centre, part of the European Space Agency, until 2004 when he left to pursue writing full time. He has been so kind as to indulge his Bulgarian's fans curiosity and answer some of our questions.
Starlighter: Let’s start with an unusual question. In 2004, you abandoned your science career for a writing one. Which aspect of your previous life was the most difficult to give up? Alastair Reynolds: I enjoyed my science career, but was ready to give it up when the time arose. The thing I most missed - and expected to miss - was the social interaction of working in a team. That’s about it, really. I’ve compensated by being more outgoing in my private life than was possible when I was writing every evening. So far the balance seems about right. SL: From a fan’s point of view, being a professional writer of SF is a dream job. As a successful SF writer, what is your point of view on this? Are there any drawbacks? AR: I’m very happy to be a full-time writer, and I recognise that from a certain viewpoint it’s an amazing place to be. But it was never really the dream job for me, just something I drifted into. Ten or even five years ago I would have been quite confident of being able to balance my science and writing careers. From my present point of view, there aren’t many drawbacks - I enjoy my job, it pays well enough to give my wife and I a reasonable standard of living, and I choose to work my own hours. I have enough money to spend on CDs and the occasional toy. There is perhaps not the job security one would like, but that’s true of many professions. I never felt that my job as a scientist was particularly secure - it was always a worry from one contract to the next, and I was never as prolific a paper-writer as one might have wished. You had to crank out three or four good papers a year, whereas I’d usually only manage two, and each one felt like a small mountain. SL: The Revelation Space universe has captured the imagination of many readers. Would you share with your fans how a book is born? What are the nuts and bolts of world-building? Which part of the process do you enjoy the most? AR: I am lucky to have found readers who are willing to indulge my imaginative fancies - it’s certainly not something writers can count on. I think my readers would be horrified if they knew the nuts and bolts of the creative process - how ramshackle and unplanned it is. I don’t do a great deal of planning (although I do more now than I used to do) and I certainly don’t put much energy into “world building” - I just get on with it, layering complexity and colour into the background of the story through successive drafts. A book takes me about 9 months from start to completion. Typically, I’ll have a clear idea of the type of book I want to write, which as often as not is a reaction or contrast to the book I’ve just finished. I’ll have some sketchy ideas about the overall theme, structure and story, and perhaps one or two ideas as to the main characters. That’s all I really need to start with, though. I start writing, aiming to produce a large amount of wordage in a short period of time. Once I’ve got something to work with - a very rough, undisciplined draft, unfit for any eyes but my own - I go back and try to make some sense of it. I do a lot of cutting and reworking, more than if I was better at planning. The process I most enjoy is precisely that cutting and reworking, imposing order onto a shapeless mass, and beginning to draw out the threads of the story. That’s when it all comes together for me. SL: When you write, do you reflect on every sentence, carefully picking each word, or do you let the text flow, and revise afterwards? AR: I’m very much one for just writing, and agonising about it later. As I’ve got older I’ve become less self-conscious about my writing on a line by line basis. I don’t strive for a killer first line, killer first paragraph etc. I’m much more interested in being as transparent as possible, letting the story come through clearly. SL: Have you ever experienced a writer's block? How do you deal with it? AR: Not yet. I’ve become blocked on particular stories, for various reasons, but I’ve always been able to switch onto something else and then go back later and fix whatever problem was stumping me. Very occasionally, I’ve abandoned a story – but it always stays on the hard drive, so it’s never totally dead. I work to deadlines, which are a great incentive to overcome any lingering tendencies to blockage. But, of course, one doesn’t necessarily know how one would cope with genuine writer’s block until it arrives. SL: Have you ever ended up with more than one equally logical resolutions of the story? If so, how do you choose one over the other(s)? AR: It doesn’t tend to happen that often - I’m usually aiming towards a particular ending for much of the story. When it does, I’ll write one ending and either sit on it for a while, or get my wife or friends to read it. If they feel something’s amiss, I’ll try a variant ending. Having any kind of vaguely satisfactory ending is usually an achievment. SL: Have any particular ideas, events from work or everyday life, or real people sneaked into your works? AR: I don’t think you can avoid it. An obvious example would be the team politics of the spaceship crew in PUSHING ICE - I based that on my experiences inside ESA and other scientific establishments, sitting through endless meetings. Some of the characters were also drawn, or composited from, people I know. On a micro-level, almost everything I write is drawn from something in my life, or those of the people I know. SL: Your books are highly valued here in Bulgaria, not least because of their well-built, realistic and believable characters. What is your recipe for creating them? Do you have favourite characters? Who are they? Which work of yours do you value the most?
AR: I’m always delighted when people respond to the characters, but it’s also the case that I’m sometimes described as a writer who doesn’t much care about character. It couldn’t be further from the truth, but if that’s the perception, I can only hold up my hands and say I must not be doing something right, for at least one subset of my readership or critical base. The truth is, I don’t really know why readers respond to some characters and not others - it’s a complete mystery to me, on this side of the creative wall. I suppose the characters I am most happy with tend to be the less heroic ones, such as Floyd in CENTURY RAIN. That’s also a book I am very happy with, although I’d be loathe to say which of my books is the one I value the most highly. SL: Triumvir Ilia Volyova appears to be one of the most loved characters in the Revelation Space universe. How did you come up with her character? Why did you choose her to be Russian? Have you read Russian, or Eastern European, SF and if so, what do you think about it? AR: She is such an established character in my imagination that I struggle to remember where she came from. I think she even have been a man at one point, before changing to a woman from one draft to the next – we’re going back more than fifteen years here. She has always been “older” in my eyes than I think many of my readers see her - she’s not the gun-totin’ babe that some might think! She is Russian, or of Russian extraction, simply because it seemed that there ought to be Russians in the future, and I have always enjoyed the texture of Russian (and French) names. I haven’t read much Russian or Eastern European SF, to my shame - although I did read some Lem, and I think he was an influence in some regards. SL: It is an old maxim that writers put a great part of themselves into their characters. Which character in the Revelation Space universe is most similar to you? AR: I always identified with Sylveste, even though I made him quite an unsympathetic fellow. Clavain was also a character I could empathise with. I’m not much like any of my characters, though. I think readers are sometimes taken aback when they find out that I’m quite a cheerful, optimistic individual. SL: How did you invent the world of RS? How much time did it take to blossom? In which of your previous works could a reader find traces of its evolution? AR: I started writing stories and novels set in a common future when I was in my teens. That wasn’t the RS universe, but bits of it ended up being incorporated - Yellowstone, Chasm City, the Marco Ferris mythology, some of the characters and terminology. The RS universe began to take shape in the mid eighties, through a series of abandoned novels. You can see the germ of it in my early story “Dilation Sleep”, published in Interzone in 1990, but written a year or two earlier. It didn’t firm up properly until much later in the nineties, when I was putting together REVELATION SPACE and CHASM CITY. Even now, there are huge chunks of it where I don’t know what’s happening. It’s a very organic process and I’m not in the least bit interested about keeping it all rigidly consistent. SL: Our team considers you, along with Stephen Baxter and Greg Bear, the three SF writers who employ the most up-to-date astrophysics in their fiction. Do you champion a Universe in which God does not play dice, or not? AR: It’s nice to be mentioned in the same sentence as Greg Bear and Steve Baxter. As to whether I believe God plays dice or not – which I take to mean, do I believe that we live in a deterministic universe, or one governed by the probabilistic outcomes of quantum mechanics – I’m sitting firmly on the fence. Until recently I might have said “it’s quantum fuzziness all the way down” but lately there have been some intriguing developments (loop quantum gravity, that sort of thing) which appear to point to the possibility of a classical physics underpinning quantum mechanics. In this view, the fuzziness we associate with QM is more of an emergent property, just as the laws of thermodynamics emerge from the classically-determined physics of atoms and gases. SL: In the course of human evolution, is the merging of man and machine inevitable, in the fashion of the Conjoiners and the Ultras? Is that how you see the future path of humankind? AR: No, I don’t see it as inevitable or even desirable. It’s just a set of ideas which are interesting to use in a science fictional context, and very useful as story-generating mechanisms. I’m very neutral about technology in my day to day existence - I’m not gadget driven or particularly up to date about developments. I was still using a typewriter when the rest of the writing world had moved onto computers. SL: "Human beings are most productive in a catastrophic atmosphere, because they themselves represent a catastrophe for the universe." How does such a statement sound to you? Do you think that the idea of 'malevolent aliens' permeating so many SF works is in fact grounded in the fear that Humankind itself has been a malevolent force, at least up until now? AR: Again, I’m quite neutral about the idea of humans being a force for good or evil. My books tend to focus on the darker aspects of human creativity, but I try to balance things with elements of goodness. I believe in altruism. I couldn’t write a book now which was unremittingly bleak and pessimistic, because I’m not like that. Malevolent aliens (which I don’t believe in) are really just a story mechanism, I think. I don’t think they’re telling us anything profound about our own innermost natures. SL: Your Revelation Space saga is a succession of redemptions. Is it possible that the Inhibitors are the supreme redemptive sacrifice of a Universe that devours itself in paranoid anguish? Going further, do you agree that the ultra-technological escape towards a machine awareness is an extreme manifestation of our fear of what could be, the unknown, and in the end will result in an infinite mind that remains static; a mind unable to evolve and adapt, as in Asimov's "Nightfall"? AR: I’d be wary of reading too much into the Inhibitors, which were really just a science fictional explanation for the Fermi Paradox. I hit the problem first (realising that I’d written a novel in which there was an unexplained absence of alien societies) and came up with the solution afterwards. Later I discovered that several other SF writers had come up similar ideas, so even the solution isn’t original. Not sure about the second point. I’m deeply skeptical of transhumanism - the idea of people uploading their minds into machines, or achieving immortality by some other means. They’re welcome to it! Death gives life meaning – it’s like the difference between an endless soap opera and a great play or film. Would we give a damn about Beethoven if Beethoven was still alive, still churning out music? SL: What part of human nature can never be changed by technology? AR: I very much doubt that there’s any part of human nature that can’t be changed. Whether the entity having the nature is human any more is another question entirely… SL: In his Hyperion-Endymion epic, Dan Simmons presents the conflict between biology and technology as a stepping stone towards Divinity. As a rationalist, how do you see the next stages in the evolution of the human mind? AR: I think it would be a very good idea just to survive the next hundred years. Let’s get through the bottleneck that the planet is heading into and then worry about messing around with basic human nature. I’m intensely cautious in my own life. I won’t have laser eye surgery, because I think (even though they’ve been doing it for two or three decades) it’s still too early to assess to the long-term consequences. SL: In your interviews, you mention the alien stereotype of pure horror in the works of Lovecraft, Bradbury and others. Your aliens, however, are frightening from a rational perspective. Do you think that what moves races along the evolutionary spiral is the predator's selfishness and fear? AR: Not sure really. I’d agree that fear is a useful component in the writer’s toolkit, and one that I’ve enjoyed deploying in many of my stories. I don’t go much further than that. I just enjoy horror stories, basically. My favorite episodes of Star Trek were always the ones with monsters in. SL: The Paradox of Fermi is a topic that often crops up in your interviews. The thesis that you support corresponds to the general view that an apocalypse is eventually inevitable. Why does this paradox allow no room for an explanation such as the one in David Brin's short story "The Crystal Spheres"? AR: The Fermi paradox is really just a nice little puzzle that helps generate story ideas. When I’ve discussed it in talks, I’m always careful to mention that there are many loopholes which might apply in reality. The apocalyptic scenario expressed in the Revelation Space books is just a point of view adopted for the purpose of those stories. SL: Is there a story of yours that has been consistently rejected and that you truly regret was never published? Have you ever been forced to alter your vision of a story for market reasons, and how has that impacted on you?
AR: I’ve been fortunate, in that there have been very few stories of mine that have not sold eventually. I don’t subscribe to the view (as advocated by Heinlein) that you should keep stories in circulation until they eventually sell. I usually give up after two or three rejections, reasoning that one rejection may be the fault of the editor, but two or three probably mean there’s something amiss with the story. The only story of mine that hasn’t sold in the last ten years was a time-travel piece about Genghis Khan, which was rejected by Interzone and Fantasy and Science Fiction. I eventually came back to it with a fresh eye, realised it was rubbish, and extracted the (few) good bits for use in a novella (also about Genghis Khan) which eventually did sell. So even then it wasn’t totally wasted work. (That story is “The Six Directions of Space”, due to appear in “Galactic Empires”, edited by Gardner Dozois for the Science Fiction Book Club). I’ve never been made to change anything, and certainly not for market reasons. I’ve occasionally had editors say “this works, but it would be even better if X or Y happened this way rather than that way” and they’ve generally been right. It was suggested to me that the original draft of “Diamond Dogs” had an ending which was too upbeat in comparison with the preceeding events, so I altered the ending to make it more downbeat, and that was the right thing to do. SL: Whom do you consider the most interesting SF writers today? What appeals to you in their books? AR: Greg Egan’s always very interesting – I enjoy the uncompromising hardness of his visions, his absolute refusal to compromise. Greg Bear was a favorite of mine when he was writing far-out SF novels along the lines of Moving Mars or Anvil of Stars, but I’m less interested in his near-future thrillers. Of the Brits, I particularly enjoy Paul McAuley and Stephen Baxter. On the edge of SF, M John Harrison and Christopher Priest. Connie Willis infuriates and entrances me with every other book she writes – PASSAGE was one of the most haunting, unsettling books I’ve ever read. I don’t read much fantasy but I enjoy the work of China Mieville and some of the other writers working in similar territory. SL: In your stories, you effectively combine cyberpunk ideas - a gloomy atmosphere, rough streets, nanotechnologies, computer viruses, etc. You shared with you readers in one of your previous interviews that Philip K. Dick has had a great impact on your development as a writer. What do you think of cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk as genre, and of the authors that work in that field - William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Michael Swanwick, Neal Stephenson, etc.? AR: Cyberpunk was enormously exciting to me when I began to get back into SF in the mid eighties. Sterling was the man. Gibson was astonishing. I liked Swanwick but always saw him as operating on a somewhat different track. He didn’t really rock my world until he wrote STATIONS OF THE TIDE, which was fantastic. Since then I’ve read most of what he’s written, and to a degree I think he’s kept the faith with “core science fiction” more than Sterling or Gibson have done, both of whom have become progressively less interesting to me the more they move away from engagement with the medium-term future. Neal Stephenson’s a bit of a closed book to me – I kind of liked DIAMOND AGE, but not enough to go away and read his other books. SL: Terry Pratchett may well be the most popular SF&F writer in Bulgaria and perhaps the only one whose popularity extends beyond SF&F fandom. In his works, he does something that we fans see as acknowledgement or tribute to the achievements of the leading authors of science fiction and fantasy. For example, in his recent novels we could recognise Dan Simmons’s idea from Hyperion about the Tombs of Time appearing in Discworld as the Future Porkmeat Storehouse, while the main characters of Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, the Bridgeburners and their commander Whisky Jack, appeared as Cheesemongers and their corporal Jackrum in Monstrous Regiment. In his latest book, Making Money, there is this Cabinet of Curiosity which looks suspiciously like an Inhibitor’s cluster. Does this flatter you? AR: I’ve no idea – I haven’t read it, so can’t comment. I’d be amazed if I was on Terry Pratchett’s radar, to be honest. In all truthfulness I’m not a massive fan – I just haven’t been knocked out by the couple of Discworld novels I read. I don’t go for much comic writing, it has to be said. I like my SF dour and serious, just as like my crime writing to be miserable and depressing, with only the merest hint of jaundiced humour. SL: What should Bulgarian readers expect of future Revelation Space books, not yet translated or written? Are you planning a book that entirely focuses on the culture of the Ultra or Skyjack fractions? AR: No idea what’s down the line. I’m pretty sure I’m not done with the RS universe, but I’d want to stop before it started becoming repetitious or self-parodic. I think there’s scope for another novel focussing on Dreyfus, the main character in THE PREFECT – in fact, since he’s a cop, there could be a whole series of Dreyfus investigations – and I’d like to do a book set after the last chapter of ABSOLUTION GAP, but before the epilogue. Beyond that, I don’t know. I tend to get ideas from writing short fiction. THE PREFECT came out of notes I made when writing the new novellas for the “Galactic North” collection, when I was playing around with some areas of the future history I felt might be ripe for further investigation. The period I most enjoy writing about is the post-Melding Plague era, when everything’s beginning to fall apart, so maybe that’s a place to do another novel. It does get tricky, though, trying to slot a new story into this pre-existing structure.
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