Here are two news bits on Alastair Reynolds gleaned from the November 2006 issue of Locus magazine. (Does it surprise anyone that I’m behind on my Locus reading when I’ve got the evil forces of the U.S. Post Office working to undermine my reading schedule? Don’t get me started…) Being a huge fan of Reynolds‘ work, I’m keen to share.


First up is a page-and-a-half reprint of the afterword that is part of his collection Galactic North, which collects all of his Revelation Space short fiction expect for “Diamond Dogs” and “Turquoise Days” (both reviewed here) because those two stories are published together in a separate book. The Galactic North afterword talks about, appropriately enough, future histories. Reynolds goes on at glorious length about his own future history. On writing such future histories, he says:

Future histories are often dismissed as exercises in laziness: why invent a new background when you can reuse one from another story. I don’t quite agree. For my money, it’s generally more difficult to write a second story in a pre-existing universe than to make a new one up from scratch. You have to work within ground rules already laid down, which places severe limits on narrative freedom.

…

By the time you’re on the eighth or ninth story in a sequence, the narrative airspace can be getting awfully crowded.

Reynolds also names writers who have influenced him, like Larry Niven (for his Known Space stories), Stephen Baxter (Xeelee sequence) and Gregory Benford (Galactic Center). Citing the influence of Bruce Sterling, Reynolds goes on to say:

…I owe an equally obvious debt to Bruce Sterling, whose Shaper/Mechanist sequence blew my mind on several levels. Sterling’s future history, even though it consists of only a single novel and a handful of stories, still feels utterly plausible to me twenty years after I first encountered it. Part of me wishes Sterling would write more Shaper/Mechanist stories; another part of me admires him precisely for not doing so. Read Schismatrix if you haven’t already done so: it will melt your face.

A nice endorsement indeed! I recently had the pleasure of reading a Shaper/Mechanist story (review soon!) and can easily believe Reynolds’ claims to its coolness.

The second tidbit gleaned from Locus – there’s a lot of gleaning when reading Locus – is from the personal future of Alastair Reynolds himself: he has recently completed writing The Prefect, a standalone thriller set in the Revelation Space universe. Sweet!

Related posts:

  1. Alastair Reynolds’ Return to Revelation Space
  2. REVIEW: Redemption Ark by Alastair Reynolds
  3. Good News from Alastair Reynolds
  4. REVIEW: Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds
  5. REVIEW: Zima Blue And Other Stories by Alastair Reynolds

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