From Issue 18 (Feb 2012)<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/p>\n
If there\u2019s one name that seems to pop up year after year on \u2018Best of SF\u2019 lists, it\u2019s Alastair Reynolds. His short stories and novels consistently top reader\u2019s polls and annual anthologies. There is a reason for this – he writes damn good Science Fiction.<\/p>\n
If his books were movies they would boast the kind of budget that Hollywood simply cannot afford – planet-sized starships; intelligent, darkly artistic nanotech plagues that twist the fabric of matter, turning whole cities into gothic nightmares and ships into cavernous biomasses; unfathomable space zoos populated by myriad alien species; a bio-mechanical spacecraft possessed by its captain; a race of Ultranauts – something between Star Trek\u2019s<\/em> Borg and Goths who got a little carried away at the body-modification parlour.<\/p>\nReynolds\u2019s books will make your eyes bleed and your brain flatline. Along the way, they\u2019ll introduce you to unforgettable characters, take you on epic journeys and leave you questioning your understanding of time and space itself.<\/p>\n
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Do you define yourself as a writer or as a scientist?<\/em><\/strong>
\nOh, purely as a writer, now. I\u2019m a former scientist. You never stop thinking like a scientist I suppose, but I don\u2019t do it anymore. I\u2019m a writer.<\/p>\nYou tend to create massive universes, these huge canvases, and then focus on a single human element in the midst of it all\u2026<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nI feel the ones that work best are the ones that focused on the characters rather than the landscapes.<\/p>\n
That comes across in your writing. You tend to focus more on the effects of space travel rather than the technology behind it.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nI always try to remember that the characters in the book should be fully embedded in the future and in the world they\u2019re living in, so for them, what we would regard as amazing technologies are completely prosaic and mundane. They\u2019re not going to be knocked out by some gadget. A spacecraft for them is just a means of getting from A to B and they don\u2019t particularly care how it functions. I try not to get into those boring discussions that you get in bad science fiction about how the engine works\u2026 unless it\u2019s central to the story, that\u2019s different.<\/p>\n
How did House of Suns come about?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nThat was something that has been brewing for a very long time. I wrote a short story called \u201cHouse of Suns\u201d, easily twenty years ago, with the intention of having it published in Interzone.<\/em> They didn\u2019t buy it and it could have dropped out of memory, but I always liked the title.<\/p>\nNow that I\u2019ve written the book, I can see that some of the elements in that original story made it to the book.<\/p>\n
It had a robot as a central character and there are robots in House of Suns<\/em>. One thing I should also say about the origin of that novel is that I did a novella a couple of years ago called Thousandth Night<\/em>, which not many people read. That kind of laid the groundwork, if you like, of the Gentian Line and the shatterlings. When I came to work on the book I kind of liked the idea of taking everything that I liked from that novella and discarding everything that I hadn\u2019t liked. In no way is House of Suns<\/em> a sequel though. It\u2019s not even consistent with Thousandth Night<\/em> but I already had the idea of Campion and Purslane from the earlier story.<\/p>\nHow does House of Suns compare with your other work?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nI genuinely wanted to write something that was quite different from the other books. I wanted to do something very far future, very colourful and big-scale and fundamentally quite optimistic. The Revelation Space<\/em> books are quite dark and claustrophobic. I enjoy writing them but I\u2019ve been living in that universe for at least ten years longer than anyone who has read them and every now and then, I just need a change of scenery.<\/p>\nHouse of Suns is written entirely in the first person, but from three different viewpoints. Was it difficult to write that way?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nI kind of groped my way into that. House of Suns<\/em> was all written from Campion\u2019s viewpoint to begin with.\u00a0 Then I started thinking that if I was going to do a book about clones, maybe I should be thinking a little more carefully about viewpoints. It seemed like the natural thing to do was to tell the story from several viewpoints, and because they are fundamentally the same person, I thought I could get away with the first-person viewpoints.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s fairly unique\u2026<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nIt\u2019s not the done thing to do a multiple-viewpoint novel with multiple first-person viewpoints, so I kinda knew I was\u2026 not breaking the rules\u2026 but violating one of the things they say you shouldn\u2019t do.<\/p>\n
I added Purslane\u2019s point of view after Campion\u2019s. Later, I realised I could put Abigail\u2019s strand in there as well.<\/p>\n
There were actually a few technical problems with that quite late in the writing of the book. There is a strict alternating pattern all the way through the book, between Campion and Purslane, and then at the beginning of each section you get the viewpoints from Abigail, and quite late in the process I realised I had screwed it up. [Laughs] At some point, I\u2019d moved a chapter around for plot purposes and thrown the whole rhythm of the story out, so there was some fairly furious fiddling around to reinstate the correct viewpoints.<\/p>\n
Hopefully the scars don\u2019t show. From that perspective it was technically<\/em> difficult, not artistically difficult.<\/p>\nHow do you keep track of the strands?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nI just kind of feel my way into it – a lot of it doesn\u2019t come out until much later in the process, the final draft before submission. As I always say, my books are almost completely broken until the last day, when I just move them around and try to get them to come together. What I do to help myself follow this kind of structure is I use a lot of colours and fonts within my working documents. With House of Suns<\/em>, for instance, Campion\u2019s strand would be in one colour, and Purslane\u2019s would be in another and Abigail\u2019s in another, and there would be various other colours for other things – it just enables me to keep track.<\/p>\nOne of your great strengths is the ability to sustain the chaos all the way to the end – it makes your books incredibly unpredictable.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nIt\u2019s nice to hear that, I also get the opposite criticism where people have told me that they can see the end a mile off.<\/p>\n
What I\u2019ve done in the past is I\u2019ve had a rough outline of the book and when I come to the critical point in the book I\u2019ll flip a coin and go in the opposite direction to what I thought – if I can surprise myself, hopefully I can surprise the reader. But there needs to be some kind of payoff. I mean, a reader will put up with that only if they know there\u2019s going to be some sort of reward at the end of the book.<\/p>\n
A lot of people have a problem with the way Absolution Gap<\/em> resolves, for instance, so I\u2019m always mindful of the perception in the reader\u2019s mind of the way the story is developing.<\/p>\nYour books tend not to really end – they just kind of stop. How do you know when you\u2019ve finished a book?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nThere\u2019s usually a scene I have in mind that I\u2019m aiming for when I\u2019m writing the book. It\u2019s a key scene that I work towards.<\/p>\n
I struggle with endings. I struggle with endings in other books by other writers. For me, 95 percent of the enjoyment of a book is the journey, not the destination. Time and again, when I\u2019m reading a book by another writer, I get a sense of impatience. I\u2019m really enjoying the book, but I\u2019m now anxious to start another one and I tend to get that in the last 50 pages.<\/p>\n
Now whether that sense of impatience translates into my own fiction I don\u2019t know, maybe it does, seeing I\u2019m always looking forward to the next one.<\/p>\n
One could argue that since you\u2019re writing future histories, those histories don\u2019t really end.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nThat\u2019s true, yeah, though frustrating for the reader to have that message rammed down their throat in every book.<\/p>\n
House of Suns<\/em> was certainly written with the intention that there would not necessarily be a sequel to it. It\u2019s not a springboard for another novel; it\u2019s not a slingshot ending.<\/p>\nDo you <\/em><\/strong>ever plan a sequel, or do you just find yourself being drawn back to a particular story?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nI always felt with Pushing Ice<\/em> that I wanted to do sequel, even when I was writing it. I haven\u2019t done that yet, though it is certainly in my long-term plans. I enjoyed writing Century Rain<\/em> enormously, but it was always clearly a stand-alone to me, and I\u2019ve been very resistant to pressure from readers. But no, I don\u2019t have a master-plan where I\u2019m sort of planning eight books ahead – I tend to have a vague idea where I\u2019m going to go in the next book, but I certainly don\u2019t think more than one book ahead.<\/p>\nIn writing it\u2019s dangerous to think more than one book ahead.<\/p>\n
As a reader, you come to expect that not all the loose ends are going to be tied up in an Alastair Reynolds novel\u2026<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nI don\u2019t particularly like the type of fiction where all the loose ends are tied up. One of the models of my type of fiction is crime-fiction and in most good crime fiction you don\u2019t find out everything at the end of the book. There\u2019s a measure of resolution at the end, but it\u2019s not complete.<\/p>\n
Did you have a clear ending for <\/em><\/strong>Pushing Ice? It feels like a science-experiment – let\u2019s fling a bunch of 21st century humans further than ever before and see how long they manage to survive.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nI didn\u2019t have a clear destination with that book. I can go right back to the earliest notes I made for that book and I can remember that I didn\u2019t know where I was going on that level. But because it was episodic, I was able to start writing it with the destination only vaguely clear in my mind.<\/p>\n
The mythology of <\/em><\/strong>House of Suns is incredibly facetted and beautiful.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nI enjoyed putting it all together and embroidering it with little details. What I really enjoy is the point in the writing where you take some of these half-formed ideas and you go back and enrich them a little.<\/p>\n
How has your style evolved over the years?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nWhen I set out to be an SF writer, I didn\u2019t ever want to be a one-note writer. I always had a lot of different ambitions and a lot of different influences feeding me as a writer and I began to have this uncomfortable feeling a few years ago that I was beginning to get a little bit self-parodic<\/em>, if you like.<\/p>\nWhenever I was mentioned in an article it was always, Cyber-Goth\/Techno-Art\/Space Opera, and all that. That is certainly an accurate description of the Revelation Space<\/em> set, but that\u2019s not the be-all and end-all of my ambitions as a writer. So I felt that I needed to start staking out a more literary territory, if you like. I began that process with Century Rain<\/em> – that was a clear attempt by me to say, \u201dlook, I\u2019m not going to be just about cyborgs and nanotech for ever and ever\u201d. And I felt with House of Suns<\/em> that I wanted to counter some of these accusations of miserable-ism<\/em>, but also it was just the book I wanted to write at the time.<\/p>\nWhat I loved about <\/em><\/strong>Century Rain was the amalgamation of 50\u2019s noir detective novel within an unbelievably imaginative SF world.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nI was aware that there were definitely antecedents of that. Other people had done Chandler versus SF, if you like, so I wanted to do Maigret, I suppose, for no other reason than that I like Paris. It was the first city I visited outside of the UK. It\u2019s always felt like an accessible city for me, and easily researchable. I\u2019ve got lots of books on French culture and my wife is French, so we\u2019ve got lots of photo-albums. The whole thing felt like a book I could tackle.<\/p>\n
And for the reader it\u2019s fun to read an SF book within an architecture and city that is familiar; to wander those streets through your eyes. Have you considered adapting it to film?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nIt\u2019s definitely the one I would put forward as the most filmable, and I always say, \u201dif you don\u2019t like science fiction and you want to read something of mine…\u201d Indeed, it\u2019s the most cinematic and self-contained with a relatively simple plot. Nothing\u2019s come of that yet, my phone is hardly ringing off the hook with offers. [laughs]<\/p>\n
Speaking of film, do you struggle to enjoy mainstream Sci-Fi movies?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nNot really, I just disengage whatever part of my brain would tend to get annoyed with that kind of thing. I think I used to, when I was younger, get really foamy at the mouth with that kind of thing. But I am a big fan of Doctor Who<\/em>, which is very cavalier in its approach to science.<\/p>\nIt has science?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nIt has an attitude<\/em> to science. Science is respected by the characters. Star Trek<\/em> always had that. I like that type of Science Fiction.<\/p>\nI\u2019m not a big media science fiction fan. Most of it doesn\u2019t really engage me to any large degree. I never saw Babylon 5<\/em>, I saw a few episodes of Battlestar Gallactica<\/em> and I found it too grim. What I like about Doctor Who<\/em> is that it\u2019s funny – it operates on quite a few levels.<\/p>\nOne of the few recurring elements you use is prolonged human life. Is this simply a writing tool you use to be able to tell stories that, by necessity, take place over decades, centuries and millennia, or do you feel, as a scientist, that the prolongation of a single life-time will be extended to such lengths in the future?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nIt\u2019s both actually, it\u2019s not a wish fulfillment thing as I don\u2019t think it will happen in my lifetime, but people will live longer in the future. It is just a technical problem, really. The fact that they can already achieve that with mice by tweaking a few genes suggests to me that sooner or later they will solve it for human beings.<\/p>\n
When you\u2019re talking about a high-tech future, it\u2019s something you have to address. You have to decide do they live longer or do they not, and if not, is it a medical impossibility or is it choice; so that\u2019s part of the thinking that fed into the Revelation Space<\/em> books. And then indeed, if you\u2019re telling a story where you don\u2019t have faster-than-light travel and it takes decades to get anywhere, it\u2019s useful to have people who live a long time. So yeah, it\u2019s partly a literary device but it also comes from my convictions about life.<\/p>\nSo, why is FTL (faster-than-light) travel impossible?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nWell, I don\u2019t think it is<\/em> impossible. Maybe I would say that it is probably<\/em> impossible, but it\u2019s not a completely closed question. If you take special relativity as your standpoint then indeed it appears to be impossible because it takes an infinite amount of energy to accelerate anything up to the speed of light. But we know that special relativity and general relativity are not the end of the story because they are incomplete descriptions. They don\u2019t dovetail with quantum mechanics and we know that quantum mechanics isn\u2019t a complete description either. So a fundamental theory of everything is still waiting to be discovered.<\/p>\nFor my money, there are still little tantalising hints of weirdness like the quantum non-locality – the idea that one particle somewhere in the world can be influenced by another particle, apparently without any physical connection and instantly, without any time lag. And then there\u2019s blackholes and wormholes and stuff like that.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m quite open-minded about it all. I put the no-FTL barrier in the Revelation Space books mainly because it seemed like an interesting boundary to put on the books.<\/p>\n
What psychological effects do you think decades-long space travel would have on a human mind?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nHard to tell. It would depend on the environment. Presumably, travelling in a huge generation ship with lots of different biospheres and communities and millions of other colonists wouldn\u2019t be as psychologically upsetting as being confined to a tiny ship with only a small number of fellow crewmembers.<\/p>\n
Why do you think human beings are so obsessed with space travel? Isn\u2019t it illogical? We have everything we need on Earth – air, water, food, sunlight, grass under our feet – why does the idea of spending decades stuck in a metal box in the darkest, coldest place in the universe sound so appealing?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nIt\u2019s not about the travel, so much as the destination. Who wouldn\u2019t want to walk around on Mars for a bit, or gaze up at Saturn\u2019s rings? Logic doesn\u2019t really have to come into it, I think. It\u2019s not \u2019logical\u2018 for me to want to sit on a plane for 14 hours to fly to America, since almost everything there can be had where I live. But I still like going to America.<\/p>\n
What blows your mind?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nI get a big kick out of science. I read Scientific American<\/em> and I watch science programmes on telly and I read the papers. Every now and again, something comes along which fascinates me. I still get a kick out of science fiction too, when, every now and again, I get a big dose of a sense of wonder that keeps me reading.<\/p>\nA longer version of this interview was originally published in Issue 7<\/a> of <\/em>Something Wicked.<\/em><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/somethingwicked.co.za\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/caticon-stalking.jpg\" "\\"caticon-stalking\\"")
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