We
start with astronomy, or at least with the exploration of the universe, before
moving to his own universe and what occurs in it We
start with astronomy, or at least with the exploration of the universe, before
moving to his own universe and what occurs in it
It is clear that Alastair Reynolds thinks big, in both his day and night jobs.
He has travelled from the day job with the European Space Agency in Holland to Birmingham. By way of visiting his family who still live in. He's here for a book signing and to talk tonight to the local SF group - his first time speaking to an SF. group. Our talk in the afternoon happily proves to be a good rehearsal, allowing him to get things like time-scales for the writing of Revelation Space, his first book straight again in his mind - the book was started six years ago, and languished with Gollancz for two periods of a year at a time, while they first of all lost a letter to him and then decided whether to do ahead at all with it. Then there was a sudden burst of frenetic activity, of re-writes, proof-reading and the like, culminating in the publication date being moved up six months at the last possible moment.
Revelation space is Reynolds's first book, and if you are going to start with a first book it might as well be a big book. This is a big book, in terms of sheer bulk and word count, as well as in scope - there is a big universe tucked within the covers - unfortunately as I am trying to explain why I am not keen on the spaceship on the front cover a waitress comes by with a plateful of the latest fashionable ubiquitous food, prawns wrapped in filo pastry with their still shelled tails sticking out as a sort of handle - that is just what the ship resembles.
'To be fair, artist Chris Moore was only given two pages of the book as a brief, and knowing which two pages I can see where the design came from, but, no, it isn't the design in my mind'
The day job for Reynolds is with ESA in Holland. At present he is part of a team working on the next generation of remote sensing equipment, especially for designed to study such bodies as cataclysmic variables and eclipsing binaries, by way of superconductor sensors operating at under 3deg K above absolute zero. The work is calculated at the quantum level, and the initial results are exciting. These are extraordinary bodies in space, where a while dwarf is sucking matter in, and the whole system's rotation is in hours rather than days, months or years.
Reynolds has been at ESA since finishing his education in the UK. He grew up in Wales, and then Cornwall. He did sciences at 'A' level,(physics, chemistry and maths) although he only just scraped a pass in chemistry - "I just could not get the hang of chemistry at all, and spent so long trying to master it that I nearly blew the other two" -before going to Newcastle, which he loved, to read astronomy and astrophysics. He then went to St Andrews University in Scotland to do a PhD, and hated his time there - the town and gown atmosphere was small and claustrophobic after the bustle and broadbased life of Newcastle. He took the first job he could after his doctorate and went to ESA on a fellowship, winning a UK quota post (Do not get WG on the failings of the government to fund a bigger allotment to ESA, so as to allow the best of the UK to obtain work with the Agency, which operates on a quota system - that is why, for eg there are no UK astronauts in training…) After the fellowship ended he did two years post doctoral at Utrecht before going back to ESA under a contract to a Dutch firm (thereby avoiding the quota system) and he has stayed in Holland since.
'I am working on writing software for the new system, which will allow us to detect not only when a photon is detected, but how powerful that photon is and when it arrives at the detector'
It turns out that if he was not a fairly engagingly pleasant person then Reynolds would possibly be the sort of man one would want to slap - he is good at the day job and the writing, and sits down nearly every night for a couple of hours to write.
Indeed, one could be forgiven for thinking him both smart and a bit of a swot. He and some friends did 'O' level astronomy in their own time at school, studying by themselves in the lunch breaks because they wanted to. He is still in touch with his fellow young astronomers although he is the only one of the group who has stayed with the space theme.
He has always been interested in both writing and space science, so was arguably an SF author waiting to happen. As a young lad he was winning school eisteddfods in his native Wales for his creative writings, and was first published in an anthology of welsh school eisteddfod works. "Even at junior school if I was to write a story about a dog, then it would be a dog living aboard a space station" he explained. "Being published in the anthology was in itself a big encouragement, and I was lucky at school that the teachers encouraged me, and didn't try to stop the SF angle that I was always working into everything I wrote.
He started writing short stories and has had about 20 published in such magazines as Asimov's and Interzone. He is a connoisseur of the sub-genre of the SF short story, but believes that it is in danger of dying, as the magazines which support and disseminate works by both the successful and published and the untested and unpublished die off one by one.
"There just doesn't seem to be the avid readership that there was a few years ago - when a new short story would create a buzz around fandom and generate fierce debate. The art of reviewing short stories is also fading, with the death of the magazines, and not many commentators are touching short stories these days. Add to that that even new authors seem to go straight to the book, or the trilogy, and the whole thing is in trouble.
"Short story writing is very good for writing discipline. I feel that I am no-where near really cracking the genre, although I am getting better at it."
"But I do hope not. I will keep writing short stories, and keep trying to develop and hone my skills. Maybe sometime I will have enough good stuff for an anthology but for now there are about five or six that are worth putting in a book. As for the others, well, I don't like the story or the style of them mostly, any more. I keep trying to refine my skills, so that stuff which is even as recent as four years old, well, I find it difficult to read. I am very self-critical. I think you have to be to be published. Your work can always be better, or so you think.
"Though these days I do tend to worry more about getting the story right than about the style.
"The germ of Revelation Space came about in 1986, as an entry for an L.Ron Hubbard writing competition, though it grew too long so I did not submit it. In 1993 I went back and took another look at that, and took out the good stuff - pretty much just the ideas, and wrote it again.
The first draft was typed in 1994, then I got a word processor and typed it back into that. I finished it in 1996 and submitted it in 1997, thanks to Paul McCauley, who I had known since being at St Andrews together. He was with Gollancz and gave me an introduction to his editor. I sent in the synopsis and three chapters and sat back. I didn't hear anything for a year and then I got a letter explaining that they had just found - unsent - their letter to me asking for the rest of the book. So in 1998 I sent the whole manuscript - 250,000 words long - and didn't hear again for a year. Last year Gollancz bought the book and everything had to be finished immediately! Frantic re-writes, I took it down to 170,000 words and then had to take it back up again when it was pointed out that some parts had lost some meaning - the problem is that you get so close to it all that you lose track."
Reynolds has always been a reader of SF, and confesses to a dark secret - he also reads crime fiction - "it is the alternate genre for me…Chandler, Dibden, Elroy especially. I find that so often the dialogue is so well crafted, and the way the author will structure his story, deal with the clues and red herrings" His SF influences are classical also: "Asimov, Clarke, Bob Shaw, Larry Niven, Joe Haldeman, Phillip K Dick, I really got excited about cyberpunk and William Gibson. And I love to burrow back into the really old stuff, the forgotten and lost stuff of 50 years ago. The science then was so basic but if you can ignore that you can still enjoy the stories and the crafting so much."
"These days it is important to get the science right in SF - the science of now…which itself prompts new stories and concepts which weren't available to writers such as Asimov…concepts such as new realities - although once a concept has been in Star Trek (such as alternate realities) then it is mainstream and common knowledge and no longer new and hard SF!"
"Revelation Space took a long time from writing to publication, but I have already just about finished the second book in that universe (I have a contract for three books there). The second book has a much smaller focus, human issues such as revenge. Everyone has an agenda, it is more narrow and murky. It is written in the first person, the hero is a male, a very flawed person. It has turned out to be a very dark book, about personality and identity, about memory transfer and the complications of a long lifespan and for how long one would then be liable for sins. Is there redemption or is a bad person always a bad person? It expands on the early history of the Revelation Space universe…and no, the hero is not me at all.
"That one is due out about this time next year, at the same time as Revelation Space in paperback. The third will probably take off from Revelation Space, not the same characters but it will deal with some of the consequences, be more cosmic, deal with civilisations, mighty forces, be much bigger."
"I have been a bit overwhelmed by the reception for Revelation Space. I had never done a book signing or talked to an SF group. I had only gone to one convention ever. I enjoyed reading the reviews, though sometimes they surprise me, for example by saying that so-and-so was clearly an influence when I feel fairly sure I had not read anything by so-and-so…!"
It is always interesting to discover how an author views his work, and Reynolds is no particular exception Make of it what you will but he is clearly very self-disciplined. He writes for two hours a day nearly every day, going up to his workspace at about 8pm each night and aiming to produce about two thousand words. He has no plans to give up the day job in science, but such self-discipline is remarkable. "Oh, I don't really do it quite so rigidly" he pleads "sometimes it is very easy and the words flow wonderfully while sometimes nothing comes and you look at the screen and struggle to type anything. Sometimes you just write down what is happening before you, the characters just do their lives and you take notes."
The bad days cannot be that common though, because when I task him about such dedication and single mindedness he amends his output only a little "well, 10,000 words a week, then" and then claims not to be overly fetishistic about getting down the words or the mechanics of writing "I don't have to have a certain sort of hand-made paper, or pencils made in 1934 from the wood from one particular tree, that sort of stuff. Anyway, if you hit a brick wall in writing it usually simply means that it is going wrong somewhere. I do do a lot of drafts, and edit, edit, edit."
"I enjoy writing, It is a series of challenges, it can be a torture at times, but if I find I am in a situation where I cannot write then the itch to write develops and gets stronger and the ideas start to pile up."