Sunday, June 28, 2009
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Neologism / SCI FI
"When you're writing stuff that's already clotted with neologisms and trying to get across fairly abstruse concepts, you're already putting a heavy burden on the reader," he explains. Readers may find themselves in an unfamiliar universe, on another planet, or in a spaceship, and flowery sentences can end up getting in the way. He wants his prose to be "functional, but elegant", not "a gauze you have to look through".
"I don't like a lot of what's published as hard SF," he says. "Much of it is rightwing, reactionary crap." Hard SF's insistence on abiding by the laws of contemporary physics is more than just a straitjacket, he continues – it's also unrealistic. "If you're speculating about the state of knowledge 500 years from now, or even 50 years from now, there will clearly be things that will be known then that we would now consider to be nonsensical, or which would directly contradict present theories, in the same way that plate tectonics would have been considered pseudoscience 100 years ago."
•
News
'No one pointed a gun at my head and said, become a science fiction writer'
SF's rising star Alastair Reynolds has just signed a £1m contract to deliver 10 books over 10 years. He talks to Richard Lea about his plans for a space opera trilogy and the tricky business of peering into the future
Audio exclusive: short story by Alastair Reynolds
•
•
o Richard Lea
o guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 23 June 2009 08.43 BST
o larger smaller
'It’s not that hard to think of 10 books I want to write' ... Alastair Reynolds, who has just signed a 10-book, £1m contract with Gollancz. Photograph: Martin Godwin/Guardian
Alastair Reynolds is in reflective mood. Nineteen years after the science fiction author's first short story was published, and nine years after his first novel, Revelation Space, announced the birth of a new star in the SF firmament, he's just signed a 10-year, 10-book contract for £1m with Gollancz, confirming his status as one of the big players in a genre that's exerting an increasing pull on the mainstream.
"I love the writing, yeah. There's a tension there, in the sense that you've got 200,000 words, and you know you can't get every one of them right." Put like that, it sounds like nothing more than common sense, but this is an admission unimaginable from many more literary writers.
"One of the big breakthroughs I had as a writer was when I stopped agonising over every word," he continues. "Particularly when I made the transition from typewriter to PC ... the temptation to endlessly polish the first line, the first paragraph, the first page – it stymies a lot of people. You never get on to the second page."
For Reynolds, everything is bent to the service of the story. That's not to say that his prose is only a vehicle to get the job done, or that he doesn't put any effort into the nuts and bolts of his prose, he adds quickly – it's just that the effects he's interested in depend more on clarity than poetry.
"When you're writing stuff that's already clotted with neologisms and trying to get across fairly abstruse concepts, you're already putting a heavy burden on the reader," he explains. Readers may find themselves in an unfamiliar universe, on another planet, or in a spaceship, and flowery sentences can end up getting in the way. He wants his prose to be "functional, but elegant", not "a gauze you have to look through".
It's tempting to see the roots of this emphasis on transparency in Reynolds's scientific training. Born in south Wales in 1966, he studied astronomy at Newcastle and St Andrews before moving to the Netherlands to work for the European Space Agency, where he spent 16 years on a series of telescope projects: designing instruments, building software, analysing data and producing numerous technical papers. All the while, he was writing science fiction.
He's no longer sure whether his love of science sparked his interest in science fiction or the other way round; either way, he'd already completed two novels by the time he was 16. While he dismisses them now as derivative, these early experiments meant that he had no fear of writing at book-length, having learned the lesson that "if you do a certain amount of work every day, it will eventually become a novel". During the 1990s he grappled with anomalies in astronomical data during the day and wrote at night, gradually piecing together an invented universe in short fiction, and mapping out a massive novel.
Though perhaps a little rough and ready compared to the finely-tuned narrative engines of 2005's Pushing Ice and last year's House of Suns, Revelation Space brought together the elements that have fuelled each of the eight novels Reynolds has published since 2000. Strong characters pursue a galaxy-wide enigma at thriller pace through a universe which derives much of its strangeness from a willingness to take the laws of physics – in particular Einstein's theories of relativity – seriously, projecting them beyond our familiar environment to startling effect. It's an approach that has often seen his work grouped with "hard" science fiction, but the description makes him distinctly uncomfortable.
"I don't like a lot of what's published as hard SF," he says. "Much of it is rightwing, reactionary crap." Hard SF's insistence on abiding by the laws of contemporary physics is more than just a straitjacket, he continues – it's also unrealistic. "If you're speculating about the state of knowledge 500 years from now, or even 50 years from now, there will clearly be things that will be known then that we would now consider to be nonsensical, or which would directly contradict present theories, in the same way that plate tectonics would have been considered pseudoscience 100 years ago."
If you want the texture of an invented future to feel real, it must have some weirdness in it, he argues, because the future "isn't going to look like Star Wars, even if you're in the middle of an intergalactic space war". For Reynolds, the most telling moments in science fiction aren't the massive set pieces, the big, epic reveals, they're the quieter, subtler moments that offer a totally new perspective. He was careful, for example, never to describe the vast, interstellar spacecraft which drives the plot of Revelation Space from the outside, offering only glimpses from odd angles, or close-ups of particular sections, just as in a modern airport a passenger can board an aircraft, cross a continent and disembark without any clear idea of the machine that has carried them on their journey.
"When I look back at many of the moments of wonder, awe or terror that I've got from science fiction," he says, "it's often been because I've been put in the head of one of the characters." And it's with characters or fragments of scenes that his novels begin, often with drawings, doodles, sketches coalescing around a kernel of an idea. Then it's a question of leaping in to the story, stopping halfway along his 200,000 word journey to structure his thoughts with a felt-tip pen and the kind of whiteboard to be found in each and every scientific laboratory. It never starts with the science, he explains – "that always comes later. The science is almost window-dressing."
As part of the discussions over the new contract, he was asked to sketch out an idea of where he might be in 10 books' time, he continues, "which is crackers. But actually it's not that hard to think of 10 books I want to write." At the moment he's hatching a trilogy charting man's exploration of the galaxy, inspired by a visit to the Kennedy Space Center last year. "It was almost like an epiphany," he says. "I was completely sold on the idea that this is still a valid ambition for us as a species." He's planning to chart a possible future open to us if we can pass through the planetary bottleneck which confronts us now, with books set in logarithmic jumps 100, 1,000 and 10,000 years into the future. With a refreshing lack of the reluctance many novelists show when asked to discuss as-yet-unwritten works, he describes how he is aiming to move beyond the well-trodden path of setting up fictional bases on the moon or Mars, and re-examine how the solar system might be conquered in the light of new scientific data from the last 10 to 15 years.
He's also planning to extend his efforts to counter what he calls science fiction's "shocking track record" with women and gender – the strong female characters who are nobody's arm candy, who are more interested in pursuing their own goals than waiting around for someone to rescue them – to a more balanced treatment of race. "I've made the mistake sometimes of visualising one of my characters as black, and not stating it," he says. The trilogy will explore a future where the dominant technological culture has come from Africa, something that has been partly inspired by a new-found fascination with African music, as well as an astronomer's perspective on the possibilities for development. "They straddle the equator, the African nations," he explains, "and that immediately puts you into an advantageous position for space elevators and things like that."
Reynolds has no plans to move beyond science fiction because, he claims, he wouldn't be able to sustain his interest in any other genre. "I couldn't ever write a straight crime novel, there'd be an intrusion of weirdness at some point." However, he's quick to reject the idea that this reveals a lack of ambition, arguing that "as an SF writer you've got the infinite toolkit of the writer at your disposal", and refuses to worry about SF's lack of status.
"No one pointed a gun at my head at the start of my career and said 'Go away and become a science fiction writer'. I chose it myself. It was clear even then that you accept certain prejudices; that you will be viewed in a certain way, and that what you are writing will never have mainstream acceptance. You'll never be Booker-shortlisted, you'll probably never get on late-night TV chat shows. But I didn't want all of that anyway: for me, the rewards far outweigh the demerits."
Furthermore, it's a situation which Reynolds feels is gradually improving, with writers such as David Mitchell increasingly willing to dip into SF. Fittingly, the only concern he has for the genre which is his passion is on a much wider scale.
"The one thing that really terrifies me is we're going to get a signal from space that clears it all up," he laughs. "OK, this is how the universe works, guys." All that could come between Alastair Reynolds and a truly stellar career in science fiction, it seems, is a bunch of genuine, bona fide aliens.
• Email Recipient's email address Your first name Your surname Add a note (optional) Share Contact us Contact the Books editor
Report errors or inaccuracies: Letters for publication should be sent to: If you need help using the site: Call the main Guardian and Observer switchboard:
+44 (0)20 3353 2000 Listen In this new short story, Reynolds considers the ways in which the pressures of war shape those who fight them More on this story Space opera supremo Alastair Reynolds scores unprecedented 10-year, 10-book deal for his 'mean line in alien cultures and technology' 18 Jun 20096 Jun 200928 Feb 200916 Feb 2007 Email Recipient's email address Your first name Your surname Add a note (optional) Share Contact us Contact the Books editor
Report errors or inaccuracies: Letters for publication should be sent to: If you need help using the site: Call the main Guardian and Observer switchboard:
"I don't like a lot of what's published as hard SF," he says. "Much of it is rightwing, reactionary crap." Hard SF's insistence on abiding by the laws of contemporary physics is more than just a straitjacket, he continues – it's also unrealistic. "If you're speculating about the state of knowledge 500 years from now, or even 50 years from now, there will clearly be things that will be known then that we would now consider to be nonsensical, or which would directly contradict present theories, in the same way that plate tectonics would have been considered pseudoscience 100 years ago."
•
News
'No one pointed a gun at my head and said, become a science fiction writer'
SF's rising star Alastair Reynolds has just signed a £1m contract to deliver 10 books over 10 years. He talks to Richard Lea about his plans for a space opera trilogy and the tricky business of peering into the future
Audio exclusive: short story by Alastair Reynolds
•
•
o Richard Lea
o guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 23 June 2009 08.43 BST
o larger smaller
'It’s not that hard to think of 10 books I want to write' ... Alastair Reynolds, who has just signed a 10-book, £1m contract with Gollancz. Photograph: Martin Godwin/Guardian
Alastair Reynolds is in reflective mood. Nineteen years after the science fiction author's first short story was published, and nine years after his first novel, Revelation Space, announced the birth of a new star in the SF firmament, he's just signed a 10-year, 10-book contract for £1m with Gollancz, confirming his status as one of the big players in a genre that's exerting an increasing pull on the mainstream.
"I love the writing, yeah. There's a tension there, in the sense that you've got 200,000 words, and you know you can't get every one of them right." Put like that, it sounds like nothing more than common sense, but this is an admission unimaginable from many more literary writers.
"One of the big breakthroughs I had as a writer was when I stopped agonising over every word," he continues. "Particularly when I made the transition from typewriter to PC ... the temptation to endlessly polish the first line, the first paragraph, the first page – it stymies a lot of people. You never get on to the second page."
For Reynolds, everything is bent to the service of the story. That's not to say that his prose is only a vehicle to get the job done, or that he doesn't put any effort into the nuts and bolts of his prose, he adds quickly – it's just that the effects he's interested in depend more on clarity than poetry.
"When you're writing stuff that's already clotted with neologisms and trying to get across fairly abstruse concepts, you're already putting a heavy burden on the reader," he explains. Readers may find themselves in an unfamiliar universe, on another planet, or in a spaceship, and flowery sentences can end up getting in the way. He wants his prose to be "functional, but elegant", not "a gauze you have to look through".
It's tempting to see the roots of this emphasis on transparency in Reynolds's scientific training. Born in south Wales in 1966, he studied astronomy at Newcastle and St Andrews before moving to the Netherlands to work for the European Space Agency, where he spent 16 years on a series of telescope projects: designing instruments, building software, analysing data and producing numerous technical papers. All the while, he was writing science fiction.
He's no longer sure whether his love of science sparked his interest in science fiction or the other way round; either way, he'd already completed two novels by the time he was 16. While he dismisses them now as derivative, these early experiments meant that he had no fear of writing at book-length, having learned the lesson that "if you do a certain amount of work every day, it will eventually become a novel". During the 1990s he grappled with anomalies in astronomical data during the day and wrote at night, gradually piecing together an invented universe in short fiction, and mapping out a massive novel.
Though perhaps a little rough and ready compared to the finely-tuned narrative engines of 2005's Pushing Ice and last year's House of Suns, Revelation Space brought together the elements that have fuelled each of the eight novels Reynolds has published since 2000. Strong characters pursue a galaxy-wide enigma at thriller pace through a universe which derives much of its strangeness from a willingness to take the laws of physics – in particular Einstein's theories of relativity – seriously, projecting them beyond our familiar environment to startling effect. It's an approach that has often seen his work grouped with "hard" science fiction, but the description makes him distinctly uncomfortable.
"I don't like a lot of what's published as hard SF," he says. "Much of it is rightwing, reactionary crap." Hard SF's insistence on abiding by the laws of contemporary physics is more than just a straitjacket, he continues – it's also unrealistic. "If you're speculating about the state of knowledge 500 years from now, or even 50 years from now, there will clearly be things that will be known then that we would now consider to be nonsensical, or which would directly contradict present theories, in the same way that plate tectonics would have been considered pseudoscience 100 years ago."
If you want the texture of an invented future to feel real, it must have some weirdness in it, he argues, because the future "isn't going to look like Star Wars, even if you're in the middle of an intergalactic space war". For Reynolds, the most telling moments in science fiction aren't the massive set pieces, the big, epic reveals, they're the quieter, subtler moments that offer a totally new perspective. He was careful, for example, never to describe the vast, interstellar spacecraft which drives the plot of Revelation Space from the outside, offering only glimpses from odd angles, or close-ups of particular sections, just as in a modern airport a passenger can board an aircraft, cross a continent and disembark without any clear idea of the machine that has carried them on their journey.
"When I look back at many of the moments of wonder, awe or terror that I've got from science fiction," he says, "it's often been because I've been put in the head of one of the characters." And it's with characters or fragments of scenes that his novels begin, often with drawings, doodles, sketches coalescing around a kernel of an idea. Then it's a question of leaping in to the story, stopping halfway along his 200,000 word journey to structure his thoughts with a felt-tip pen and the kind of whiteboard to be found in each and every scientific laboratory. It never starts with the science, he explains – "that always comes later. The science is almost window-dressing."
As part of the discussions over the new contract, he was asked to sketch out an idea of where he might be in 10 books' time, he continues, "which is crackers. But actually it's not that hard to think of 10 books I want to write." At the moment he's hatching a trilogy charting man's exploration of the galaxy, inspired by a visit to the Kennedy Space Center last year. "It was almost like an epiphany," he says. "I was completely sold on the idea that this is still a valid ambition for us as a species." He's planning to chart a possible future open to us if we can pass through the planetary bottleneck which confronts us now, with books set in logarithmic jumps 100, 1,000 and 10,000 years into the future. With a refreshing lack of the reluctance many novelists show when asked to discuss as-yet-unwritten works, he describes how he is aiming to move beyond the well-trodden path of setting up fictional bases on the moon or Mars, and re-examine how the solar system might be conquered in the light of new scientific data from the last 10 to 15 years.
He's also planning to extend his efforts to counter what he calls science fiction's "shocking track record" with women and gender – the strong female characters who are nobody's arm candy, who are more interested in pursuing their own goals than waiting around for someone to rescue them – to a more balanced treatment of race. "I've made the mistake sometimes of visualising one of my characters as black, and not stating it," he says. The trilogy will explore a future where the dominant technological culture has come from Africa, something that has been partly inspired by a new-found fascination with African music, as well as an astronomer's perspective on the possibilities for development. "They straddle the equator, the African nations," he explains, "and that immediately puts you into an advantageous position for space elevators and things like that."
Reynolds has no plans to move beyond science fiction because, he claims, he wouldn't be able to sustain his interest in any other genre. "I couldn't ever write a straight crime novel, there'd be an intrusion of weirdness at some point." However, he's quick to reject the idea that this reveals a lack of ambition, arguing that "as an SF writer you've got the infinite toolkit of the writer at your disposal", and refuses to worry about SF's lack of status.
"No one pointed a gun at my head at the start of my career and said 'Go away and become a science fiction writer'. I chose it myself. It was clear even then that you accept certain prejudices; that you will be viewed in a certain way, and that what you are writing will never have mainstream acceptance. You'll never be Booker-shortlisted, you'll probably never get on late-night TV chat shows. But I didn't want all of that anyway: for me, the rewards far outweigh the demerits."
Furthermore, it's a situation which Reynolds feels is gradually improving, with writers such as David Mitchell increasingly willing to dip into SF. Fittingly, the only concern he has for the genre which is his passion is on a much wider scale.
"The one thing that really terrifies me is we're going to get a signal from space that clears it all up," he laughs. "OK, this is how the universe works, guys." All that could come between Alastair Reynolds and a truly stellar career in science fiction, it seems, is a bunch of genuine, bona fide aliens.
• Email Recipient's email address Your first name Your surname Add a note (optional) Share Contact us Contact the Books editor
Report errors or inaccuracies: Letters for publication should be sent to: If you need help using the site: Call the main Guardian and Observer switchboard:
+44 (0)20 3353 2000 Listen In this new short story, Reynolds considers the ways in which the pressures of war shape those who fight them More on this story Space opera supremo Alastair Reynolds scores unprecedented 10-year, 10-book deal for his 'mean line in alien cultures and technology' 18 Jun 20096 Jun 200928 Feb 200916 Feb 2007 Email Recipient's email address Your first name Your surname Add a note (optional) Share Contact us Contact the Books editor
Report errors or inaccuracies: Letters for publication should be sent to: If you need help using the site: Call the main Guardian and Observer switchboard:
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