An Interview with Alastair Reynolds
On September 8, 2005, two of our very own, Ernest G. Saylor and Joseph W. Dickerson, managed to arrange an exclusive interview with Alastair Reynolds, who currently resides in the Netherlands. Mr. Reynolds is an accomplished and leading edge science fiction writer with six novels under his belt. Much of his work has been nominated for various awards; however, his novel Chasm City won the British Science Fiction Award for Best Novel, and his novel Redemption Ark won a Chronicle Award for Best Novel. His seventh novel, Pushing Ice, is due to be released in the U. K. in late October. Presented below is the transcript from that interview. You can find out more about him at his official website, located at the following URL: http://members.tripod.com/~voxish/index.html
Aberrant Dreams: When I was young, I distinctly remember reading Clarke Aston Smith’s Master of the Asteroid (1932), Donald Wandrei’s The Red Brain (1927), and H. P. Lovecraft’s Shadow out of Time (1936). Those were very important short stories in their own turn, but they impressed me in a big way. As a successful short story writer, what are some of the earliest ones you remember reading, and how have they influenced you as a writer and a person?
Alastair Reynolds: When I was a kid, probably about eight years old, I encountered my first written science fiction. The magazine I was reading, which was not a science fiction magazine, was just a technical magazine for boys with pictures of battleships, tanks, but they started running short stories by Arthur C. Clarke at the back of the magazine. These were all old Clarke stories that they got the rights to publish.
They all stuck in my mind to one degree or another, but the one that really blew me and set me on a course for life was A Meeting with Medusa, which was Clarke’s story [written in] about 1970. This was actually a recent story at the time when I read it, which was about ’73 or ’74. It was just this mind-blowing trip about this astronaut that goes into Jupiter, and he meets all sorts of weird Aliens and things like that floating in the atmosphere, and it’s just a blast. At the end of the story, we find out that he’s kind of a cyborg, because he had this horrible accident right at the beginning, which Clarke is very coy about right at the start of the story and doesn’t tell you exactly what happens. That had a big impact on me.
The same magazine started running Asimov’s early short fiction. In particular, they did the whole sequence of the early robot stories, like Robbie (1940), Runaround (1941), and things like that. Those obviously stick in my mind. They also ran some of Asimov’s early space operas like The Weapon Too Dreadful to Use (1939), which I think is one of his very earliest stories. I also found that one very disturbing when I read it. So, yeah, for me it was Clarke's and Asimov’s. It was only when I was a bit older that I started heading to the school library and reading other writers like Phil Dick and people like that.
Aberrant Dreams: My son, of whom we spoke, is majoring in geology, and Asimov is his main man. He is an avid hiker and outbacked pieces of the Appalachian Trail several years back, and he toted in his backpack one of those bonded leather editions of the Foundation Trilogy everywhere he went.
Alastair Reynolds: It’s funny, I read the Foundation Trilogy when I was about sixteen or something. I remember it was this huge, daunting thing I had to build up to read, and it was these three huge books. You look at it now and it’s just so small. We have had to adjust our expectations about the size of books since that came out.
Aberrant Dreams: That’s true. It’s like H. G. Wells. Many of his most famous novels are just a few hundred pages or so.
Alastair Reynolds: Yes, and I doubt that the individual books of the Foundation Trilogy are much more than two hundred pages. I had the same thing with Dune. It was this huge, monolithic book, and now I pick it up and think, oh, it’s only six hundred pages.
Aberrant Dreams: While you mention Dune, I have frequently heard that Frank Herbert, once he started Dune, was almost trapped by it because it was one of the first big, best-selling science fiction novels, and the publisher kept pushing him for more.
Alastair Reynolds: I’m sure there’s some truth in that. I never really read the later Dune books. I know some people have opinions about how successful the sequels are, but I just stopped with Dune.
Aberrant Dreams: Have you been asked in any way to continue the Revelation Space series?
Alastair Reynolds: Well, there is considerable pressure from fans to do more books and stories in that universe, but the one thing I’m really happy with is that my publisher has given me complete latitude to do what the hell I like with the next book. They’ve never pressured me to do another Revelation Space book. I mean, to some extent, if they had, I would have probably resisted it, but the fact that they haven’t makes me more open minded about doing another one at some point.
Aberrant Dreams: None of us can believe that you don’t have a hard cover collection of short stories out there somewhere. What’s the deal on that?
Alastair Reynolds: Actually, it’s funny you should mention it, because this summer I really felt that I was moving into a period when I can spend some time working on the collection again. So, I’ve been in touch with the publisher to check if they are still interested, and now there’s movement again. Just this week, I, with my wife, have dug through a lot of old floppy disks, and we’ve recovered some stories that I didn’t think we still had copies of. So, that’s good. I’m somewhat optimistic that it will happen now.
Aberrant Dreams: That wouldn’t be Jim Turner’s old publishing house [Golden Gryphon], would it?
Alastair Reynolds: No. Well, it’s half-and-half. What happened was that Golden Gryphon got in touch with me about their interest in working on a collection, but only a few days before, I had contact with Nightshade, another U. S. press, who, up until then, had been more focused on horror. So, I said that I had already committed to doing [a collection] with the Nightshade guys, but I did work with Golden Gryphon on a novella. The arrangement at the moment is that I’m working with Nightshade, putting this collection together. It’s being edited, though, by Marty Halpern, who is Golden Gryphon’s editor. So there is a little bit of connection there back to Jim Turner’s outfit.
Aberrant Dreams: I have followed Arkham House for many years, certainly throughout the Jim Turner phase, when many people were saying, “Is this guy crazy? What’s this guy doing to Arkham House?” when he was publishing Greg Bear and Michael Bishop. They seem to forget that Derleth published Slan (1946) as well as Throne of Saturn (1949). Arkham House had already published a lot of science fiction, so I didn’t understand what all of the complaining was about.
Alastair Reynolds: Yeah, I bought some of those Arkham House books, Bruce Sterling’s collection, Crystal Express I think it was, was an Arkham House hard cover. He’s probably one of my favorite contemporary science fiction writers. I go back to his stuff often, and I get a lot from it.
Aberrant Dreams: This is more of a question in regards to the business side of the craft. Virtually, every writer that you speak with has his or her own personal horror story as to the number of times they have been rejected, and they pretty much guarantee that it is a part of the business. My question to you is, when you first started out, how were you able to keep yourself motivated and persistent enough to make your first sale?
Alastair Reynolds: I think many writers will probably tell you that you have to have a certain amount of faith in your own abilities. You have to feel that you’re bashing against a wall, but one day you’ll break through it. I always felt, even when I was getting rejections for short stories, that at some point, they were going to bite. But, how long I would have carried on, I don’t know. I actually only picked up a few rejection letters before I made my first sale. If that had gone on for years and years, I don’t know how I would have stuck with it.
I tried writing stuff for comics, but I never got into that. I gave that up after a while, saying, okay, I am just not cut out for it. That dream has died, as far as I’m concerned, and I have no intention of ever doing it again. But with fiction, the reward came in a few years of me starting to sell a few stories.
Aberrant Dreams: Have you published any scientific articles relating to astrophysics or other related areas?
Alastair Reynolds: Oh yeah, I've had many, many in all the major astronomical journals. Over the last fifteen or sixteen years, I’ve published papers. Boring, I have to say. They have no conceivable interest to anyone who isn’t an astronomer. I think I did about fifteen or twenty first-author papers, and then I got my name on a few other papers. The most recent one came out about a month ago because, even though I gave up my job a year ago, there is this huge lag between completing a paper and getting it into print.
Aberrant Dreams: It’s been theorized that when humanity has advanced far enough, he will cease to make war upon himself. Yet, in your novels, the society of humankind is as turbulent as ever. I understand that a novel about two old ladies playing cards and talking about their flowers probably isn’t going to sell very well, but when developing your stories, how do you balance action and intrigue with scientific speculations such as this?
Alastair Reynolds: I always find it a difficult balance to get right, and as I get older, I’m probably becoming a little bit more [of a] pacifist in my writing. I’m trying to get away from every single story having to have a space battle in it. As with the Revelation Space books, which do have a lot of conflict and war going on in them, I always tended to feel that they were not particularly far future. I mean, they are only four to five hundred years in the future, and a lot of the characters in those books have been around for a long time, so they are carrying a lot of baggage from the past. To some extent, I saw those books as taking our mindset and projecting it into the future. I have done other stuff in some of my short stories that are a lot further down the line: tens of thousands of years in the future.
Certainly, when you’re sitting down, you’re groping for any kind of source for conflict, because that can animate the narrative and give you lots of interesting plot possibilities. I do tend to feel that either we’ll wipe ourselves out or reach some state of enlightened pacifism. I do many stories that I see as counterpoints to the Revelation Space stuff, which is very dark and pessimistic in some respects. Every now and again, I need to cheer myself up, so I do a more optimistic story in another universe or something, in which not everybody is trying to kill each other all the time.
I’m not particularly interested in war per say, as a writer. I don’t know anything about it. I’m not interested in battle strategies [or] tactics, so I don’t read about it. People have commented that the space battles always tend to be in the background. Often I don’t even describe the battles; they simply happen between chapters. I guess that’s partly because of my basic lack of interest in battle scenes, though I am interested in espionage and things like that.
Aberrant Dreams: One of the amazing things about the Foundation Trilogy is often that when they would get together about their conflict, as soon as one figured out that he could best the other, then that was the end of it. That happened a lot in Asimov’s stuff. For the battles, there are scant descriptions at all.
Alastair Reynolds: Well, Asimov was, of course, a very vocal pacifist, and he hated war and was very outspoken about it. I think he probably felt that he needed to use his fiction as a vehicle for his belief that things could be sorted out by having a nice little sit down over a cup of tea. What I remember about the Foundation books, I haven’t re-read them since I was about sixteen, is that there is a hell of a lot of sitting around in rooms in them. There are just endless scenes where the characters are just discussing things very reasonably. The entire fate of the galaxy is being discussed in a gray room.
Aberrant Dreams: I understand you have read and enjoyed some of the work of H. P. Lovecraft, whose literature, while classified as supernatural, is riddled with aliens, and was, certainly in his day, quite avant-garde. What inspires your aliens?
Alastair Reynolds: The thing about Lovecraft is that I never really heard about him until I was a student. A mate of mine in one of the houses I was sharing accommodations with was a big Lovecraft fan, but I had no idea what this was all about. It was only within the last few years that I started reading it, so it certainly didn’t shape my imagination as a youngster, but I certainly felt a resonance. I could see where he was coming from.
With my aliens, a lot of what I write is, to some extent, a reaction against what I see as a certain trend in science fiction, which I would characterize as a Star Trek mentality, where aliens are simply people in funny suits with funny foreheads. I always felt that the aliens that really stuck in my mind and struck a cord with me were always quite weird and unsettling in some way. So, that’s the kind of [picture] I’ve always been aiming for. Plenty of writers have done excellent aliens, but I’ve always been drawn to the more esoteric, spookier kind of alien.
Aberrant Dreams: It’s funny you should mention that about Lovecraft. He was very critical of his contemporaries at the time because he said that, basically, the Martians and the aliens weren’t really aliens. All they were was just people with weapons. If they were truly aliens then they would be vastly different from us, and that’s pretty much what you’re saying.
Alastair Reynolds: Well, of course, back in the thirties, there was Stanley Weinbaum, who wrote The Martian Odyssey.
Aberrant Dreams: Yes, he did The Martian Odyssey and The Red Peri. He died very young. (Weinbaum died of lung cancer in 1935. He was only 33). He also wrote one of the best Superman novels ever, The New Adam (1939).
Alastair Reynolds: Yes he did. It’s very sad. You never know what he would have gone on to do. He could have been a major name in the field, up there with Asimov. Those of us who have read his stuff obviously think very highly of him, but he’s not a household name outside of science fiction aficionados.
Aberrant Dreams: I don’t know if it is true in Europe, but in the U. S., there has been a great resurgence in Edwardian, British science fiction. I was caught up in some of that myself, specifically Harry Collingwood and authors such as George Griffith and the Honeymoon stuff and Fenton Ash, which is a pseudonym for Frank Aubrey. These things are hard to get a hold of, especially in good condition in the first edition. Have you read much, yourself from that, and do you think there’s a grass-is-greener mentality in this regard?
Alastair Reynolds: I’m completely ignorant about the whole thing. I mean, I know nothing about Edwardian science fiction, to my shame. I’ve read none of it. I’ve read Wells, and I haven’t even read enough of Wells. I do know if there is a lot of talk about British SF in relation to American SF and how British SF is more healthy, imaginative, and more vigorous at the moment.
I’m always a bit dubious about that, because a lot of the stuff I read is American and always has been. So, I’m always a little bit cautious about being pigeonholed as a writer working in an exclusively British tradition. I read a lot of American science fiction growing up, writers like Joe Haldeman, John Varley, and Harry Harrison, who were rocking my world, to some extent. Now, I haven’t lived in Britain for fourteen years as well, so I kind of see myself as a bit of an outcast living in the Netherlands . So, I’m always a little bit unsure of what position to take on the whole British SF thing.
Aberrant Dreams: First, I’d like to say congratulations, because I understand that you’re a newlywed. The question is in what way, if any, does your wife participate in these writing endeavors? Is it solely you, or is it kind of a partnership?
Alastair Reynolds: Thank you. Well, of course, all of the brilliant ideas are mine and mine alone. No, my wife’s name is Josette, and she’s an absolute star. Without her, I couldn’t have achieved anything, because, on a basic level, she gave me the time to write. Over the last ten years, she’s been magic in making sure I have two or three clear hours in the evening to go do what I want to do after my job. So, she would always cook, do the washing up, everything like that, and I never had to worry about anything. I would just go and sit myself away in a room and write.
At a very early point, she started getting involved in actually helping me prepare stuff for submission. She would take my stories, format them for me, print them, and send them off. So I never had to worry about that. Also, very early on, I started getting her to read stuff in draft form before I would submit it to anyone. We had to go through a period where she was somewhat reluctant to criticize anything I’d written, but we got over that pretty soon, and she quickly became an honest critic with my stuff. I really value that now. She doesn’t pull any punches; she says, “Well, that just doesn’t work,” or “that’s boring.” She’s certainly a valuable part of the team.
She’s a science fiction reader herself, I should say. It’s really funny, but we didn’t meet through mutual interest in science fiction. Actually, we met because we were both interested in climbing, and it was only after we got to know each other, via our climbing club, that I found out she was really keen on science fiction. Then we found out that we had a lot of books in common, as well. That was when we really knew we had something special going on.
Aberrant Dreams: Chasm City is an incredible novel, and certainly an exercise in obsession. What was the basis for Sky Haussman? I was never able to guess ahead of time what that rascal was going to do. In my mind, he was similar to Captain Ahab. Would you resurrect him again, do you think?
Alastair Reynolds: I think I’m done with Sky Haussman. He does make a fleeting appearance in Redemption Ark . He’s the character H. So, there’s mileage there. If I wanted to do anything more with him, I could, but I sort of felt that I was done with that [type] of character.
The whole genesis of Chasm City was very messy and unpleasant. It’s like one of those stage fronts. It looks fantastic from the front, but then you go behind the scenes and it’s all rubbish. It’s quite a long story, but if I have time, I’ll tell you.
I wrote Chasm City, which was originally called Shadow Play, before I had a deal with my publisher to buy Revelation Space, and it was a relatively short novel. It didn’t have any of the Sky Haussman stuff in it. It had only the foreground story about Tanner Mirabel pursuing this killer in Chasm City , and digging into his own memory, you find that he is actually Cahuella, the guy he’s been set to avenge. The whole extra layer of stuff about Sky Haussman was dropped in later after I had the [book] deal for Revelation Space, because my publisher’s requirement was that my next novel would be of comparable size to Revelation Space.
So, I had this thing called Shadow Play, which was about half the size. I then thought, can I do anything to this book? Can I enlarge it in any way without it being padding? I didn’t want to pad it, but I wanted to see if I could deepen it and make it larger. So I went away on holiday with a notebook, and I just sat and thought about it. There had been a throwaway reference in the first draft of that book about generation ships on their way to Sky’s Edge. I thought, can I do something with that? Can I make that a sort of narrative thread? So, the whole thing became three-stranded rather than two-stranded.
By the time I got back from holiday, I had a notebook full of ideas about what was going to happen on those generation ships, and how I could tie that in to the foreground story in Chasm City. So, as I say, it was a kind of messy genesis that involved it being taken apart and reassembled with an extra plot strand in it, which is where Sky Haussman came in.
Even that was going back a few years now, so it’s difficult for me to remember exactly what my thought processes at the time were. I knew I wanted him to be a nasty little shit, basically. I suppose that’s as far as it got.
Aberrant Dreams: Another one of your characters I hated to see go was the mad doctor in Diamond Dogs. That guy was cool too.
Alastair Reynolds: Yeah, with him, I always felt that maybe there is some more mileage with Dr. Trintignant. Maybe he doesn’t die at the end; maybe it was a cunning vanishing act. I enjoyed writing that novella. I enjoyed writing his scenes because he was just creepy and malevolent. I suppose he’s a little bit like Hannibal Lector. I have fun with that (editor’s note: If Alastair Reynolds ends up pairing the good Doctor with Sky’s rabid porpoise, somebody had better watch out!).
The funny thing about that novella is that I wrote it upon commission for PS Publishing. They published it as a chapbook, but when Peter Crowther took delivery of it, he read it, and he liked it. He said, “You know, you could make this even darker if you wanted. You could make it even nastier.” So, he gave me license to go away and darken it. I’d almost put a hopeful ending, but Pete didn’t think it worked. He thought it needed an even sicker, more twisted ending, so that was what I went away and did.
Aberrant Dreams: You know, it’s another look at obsession.
Alastair Reynolds: Well, the whole genesis of that story was... I said about how my wife and I met through an interest in climbing. She’s far more serious about it than I am. She doesn’t climb anymore, but she’s still really in to it in terms of reading books and TV documentaries. We were watching a documentary about people climbing K2 , and there were these guys who had been up and down this mountain a few times. Maybe they’d summitted it, and maybe they’d failed, but they were going back for another try. Yet they had already lost toes and fingers due to frostbite, and this wasn’t stopping them. I thought, God, you can be pretty certain that if you go back to that mountain, it’s going to take another piece of you with the frostbite, even if it doesn’t kill you. I was sort of appalled and fascinated at the same time that that drive could take you to that place even though you could be certain it was going to enact a toll.
So, I started thinking about that in science fiction terms. I started thinking about a traditional sci-fi story of exploring a dangerous alien artifact. The other thing that came in was a book I’d read a long time ago, and really enjoyed, called Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys, which is a story about a guy who is forced, time-and-again, to go back and explore deeper and deeper into an alien artifact on the moon.
Aberrant Dreams: Isaac Asimov wrote that modern science fiction is the only form of literature that consistently considers the nature of the changes we face, the possible consequences, and the possible solutions. He further comments that it is the branch of literature that is concerned with the impact of scientific advances upon human beings. Do you feel your work exemplifies that perspective, and what do you personally look forward to in regards to scientific advancement?
Alastair Reynolds: Well, I’m a rationalist like Asimov, and deeply interested in science, and the whole story of scientific progress and how it changes us. So, I share that viewpoint, and I think that science fiction may not be the only literary approach that you could take in that direction, but it’s certainly one of the more effective ones. For me, the whole thrust of my writing science fiction is not necessarily to throw up a mirror to the present. A lot of science fiction is couched in metaphoric terms; it’s really about the present, rather that the future.
For me, there’s nothing inherently ignoble in speculating about the future, and in order to do that, you have to think about scientific progress and technology. I see science fiction, taken as a whole, as a collective thought experiment, where we’re looking into the future and mapping not a future, but the space of all possible futures. So yes, I’m genuinely interested in what the next hundred years is going to hold for us, and you can’t think about that sort of thing without speculating about where science is going to go.
Right now, as a science fiction writer, there are certain things I don’t want people to discover. You know, I really would be pissed off if tomorrow there was a big headline in the papers about scientist discovering intelligent aliens in Barnard Star, or something like that, because that would just kill what I was writing. There’s a conflict.
I’m very interested in the whole notion of intelligent life in the universe and inhabitable planets. I think what I really find very exciting over the next three or four decades, if budgets stay online, is that NASA and the ESA have expectations to put large telescopes in orbit that should begin imaging planets around other stars. That, for me, is really fascinating; it’s not something I ever expected would happen in my lifetime.
I am aware that as we sharpen our knowledge of our local neighborhood in the galaxy, then things, for instance, like the Revelation Space books will become increasingly obsolescent, because many of the data in those books will be contradicted by what we’ll discover. So, it is with mixed emotions, I suppose, that I look forward to that kind of development.
Aberrant Dreams: Well, I think you also answered the next question. It sounds to me that if you could solve the Fermi Paradox, then you wouldn’t.
Alastair Reynolds: Well, the Fermi Paradox is just a statement. If there are intelligent aliens out there, why don’t we see them? For me it’s just a springboard to come up with science fictional ideas that I can structure novels around, hopefully.
I’m not the only writer who is intrigued by this whole issue. There are plenty of other people operating in the same arena. There’s Steve Baxter, Paul McAuley, Greg Egan, and Robert Reed. As soon as you start thinking seriously about what it would really mean to have contact with aliens, you get into some really interesting speculative territory. I just think it is endlessly fertile, and that there is no shortage of ideas to be mined and used science fictionally.
I’m perfectly happy to take one stance on the Fermi Paradox in one book and then come back and take another nibble at it in another book from a different angle. They might be mutually contradictory, but for me, it’s just a springboard for ideas.
Aberrant Dreams: Several people I have spoken with have mentioned how your stories have so many threads within them, but I now understand this much better after hearing about how Chasm City was developed. Do you have different short stories ahead of time, even if their only in your mind, and then weave them into a novel?
Alastair Reynolds: No. The way it goes is that I’m not very good at planning things in advance. Usually, when I start writing a book, I don’t have a particularly detailed idea of the structural plot. I know roughly where I’m going, but only roughly. As I was saying with Chasm City there usually comes a point about half way through the book where I take a step back from it and say, okay, is this complicated enough? Is there enough going on? Is there scope for introducing some subplots here that can maybe work effectively, or is it already too full?
I think, as I get older with each new book, I’ve certainly been making a conscious effort to simplify things a bit, because, with the first few novels, there were so many different subplots going on that, for me, it was a question of keeping too many balls in the air at the same time. I’ve tended to feel that that level of complexity can also be a sign that you do not have a clear grasp on narrative.
So with Century Rain, I really tried to strip it down and have a simple, fairly linear storyline going on. Some people like that, and some people don’t. It’s something I’m sort of fiddling around with in each book, groping towards some sort of optimum state, I suppose. I certainly don’t plot in advance; I just thread the things gradually through.
You rely on the old subconscious to some degree. It’s often amazing to me how, right at the end of a book, you suddenly realize there’s an almost implicit story there, lurking in the background, that you weren’t really aware of when you were writing it, but now you can just bring it out a little bit.
Aberrant Dreams: For me, there is an encumbrance issue with novels like Greg Bear’s Eon. Although that one is a tremendous novel overall, one has to keep up with so many characters, and it’s a bit taxing as a reader.
Alastair Reynolds: Well, when I started writing Revelation Space, which I think has three viewpoint characters, the books I had in mind were James Ellroy’s crime novels like L. A. Confidential. He would have three or four viewpoint characters, and you would get alternating chapters that go into the head of one of these characters. I tried to analyze how he was doing it, how many pages he was spending in the head of one character before he hopped into another one, really looking at it mechanically to try to gain a handle on how he dealt with that problem. I certainly didn’t have any trouble following his stories, so I felt if he could pull it off then I would try to follow the same guidelines, and I would be able to pull it off as well.
Aberrant Dreams: While I can’t put my finger on it, your style sometimes reminds me of A. E. Van Vogt. When I mentioned this just prior to arranging this interview, you indicated you had been told that before. Would you be inclined to cite him as an influence, and if so, which of his works inspired you the most?
Alastair Reynolds: Yeah, I have to cite him because, while I mentioned Clarke and Asimov earlier, there was not a huge amount of science fiction books accessible to me when I was a kid. One of the books I did have was a collection of Van Vogt’s short stories, which was called Destination Universe (1952), and I read that over and over again. That collection had “Far Centaurus,” “A Can of Paint,” “Dear Pen Pal,” and “The Sound,” which were very weird and strange to me when I read it, but I kept coming back to it because I found it so intoxicating.
I didn’t really connect up to Van Vogt’s novels, however. I tried reading The War Against the Rull (1959) when I was a kid, but I could never get into it. I guess he has always been there in the back of my mind as an influence. I think it was M. John Harrison, the British writer, who did a review of my third novel, Redemption Ark, in The Guardian, and he used this quote: “Alastair Reynolds occupies the same frenzied, imaginative space as A. E. Van Vogt and Philip K. Dick.” My publishers thought that was a good line, so they used it on the covers of the books ever since.
I have this book by Damon Knight, a collection of critical essays, and Knight really trashed Van Vogt very publicly. He was really damning. Do you think his career ever really recovered from that?
Aberrant Dreams: Yes, but also Van Vogt was involved with a couple of other things that tarnished him a bit. One, he was very much involved with L. Ron Hubbard before the founding of the Church of Scientology . He was interested in Semantics, and he was serious about that side of it. Then when Hubbard decided he could make more money by making it a religion, they parted, but the association, nonetheless, compromised his credibility. Second, in the sixties, he did a lot of slap dash stuff where he took many of his stories and fashioned them into a novel. Some worked; however, many didn’t. The term fix-up novel comes from this technique of his.
Alastair Reynolds: The thing about the Van Vogt article is that Knight attacks The World of Null-A on a logical level, and he finds lots of logical plot holes it in and things that just do not make any sense. It’s clear, I think, that he is just missing whatever worked in that book for Van Vogt’s readers. I mean, he’s just not getting what Van Vogt was doing right for so many people.
Aberrant Dreams: The best description that I know of for Van Vogt’s writing was in John Clute and Peter Nicholls’, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. In this, Clute writes that a key to reading and understanding A. E. Van Vogt is to look at everything as though they were dream sequences. They are images that will fit together, but they are not necessarily coherently one against the other. If you can do that, then you can come away with something. Your point is most accurate about him having fans. Damon Knight must not have been correct because Van Vogt still sells like crazy. He just won the 2005 Hall of Fame Prometheus award for Weapon Shops of Isher. So, apparently much of his work still does it right.
Editor’s note: Mr. Reynolds might be referring to Damon Knight’s very first review printed in Larry Shaw’s Destiny’s Child, being a shameless scathing assault upon the 1945 Astounding Science Fiction serial version of A. E. Van Vogt’s The World of Null-A. More likely, Mr. Reynolds is recalling the essay “Cosmic Jerrybuilder” appearing in the collection, In Search of Wonder, printed in 1956 and revised in 1967. An interesting irony culled from Neil Barron’s brilliant and highly regarded critical guide to SF Anatomy of Wonder (3rd Edition) lists only two of Damon Knight’s works as being worthy of inclusion in the Core Collection Checklist. In neither case were they cited by all six knowledgeable outside readers (Bleiler, Clute, Moskowitz, Nicholls, Pohl, Wolfe). However, four times as many of A. E. Van Vogt’s works are recommended, and two of those were cited by all, one of which is The World of Null-A. Damon Knight, of course, was the founder and first President of the SFWA (now SFFWA), and there is a very interesting tribute/account by Robert J. Sawyer that can be found at http://www.sfwriter.com/vanvogt.htm that accurately describes the manner in which Van Vogt was honored by that organization.
Aberrant Dreams: I noticed that your work is always categorized as hard science fiction. Do you think that is accurate? Also, since you have been interested and a part of it, how have you seen hard SF evolve?
Alastair Reynolds: I’m okay about being called a hard science fiction writer, but what I object to is the notion that because I am writing hard SF, I can’t possibly have any wider interest in the literary world or any wider literary aspirations. I think I was talking to Wil McCarthy about this, and he said something like, “It’s a blessing and a prison to be a hard SF writer,” because you have a tremendous creative toolkit you can use to write science fiction stories.
If you are scientifically numerate--if you can put scientific ideas together in an imaginative way, and you can structure stories around them--then you have this enormously beneficial aspect to your writing. But, at the same time, it is assumed that you have a passing interest in characterization, that you are not particularly interested in prose, etc. I find I’m just as interested in prose, metaphor, character, and plot as I am in making sure that the planet goes around the right orbit.
So, I’m okay about being called a hard science fiction writer, but I always want to make it clear that many of my favorite science fiction writers are not remotely hard SF writers. I’m a big fan of writers like Jonathan Carroll, Tim Powers, and Gene Wolfe, people like that, people who are operating on the margins of science fiction and fantasy. So yeah, it can be a little bit limiting.
The good thing about hard SF is that it sells. All the editors will tell you that they never get enough of it, and if you can write a halfway decent hard SF story for a magazine, then you have a damn good chance of selling it. That certainly worked well for me, because when I was beginning my career, I had these cool credentials. I could say that I’m a scientist working for the European Space Agency, and that seemed to carry a lot of weight. People would take my stuff seriously on that basis.
If I get something wrong in my books, then it’s a capital crime because I’m an avowed hard SF writer. You have this sort of double responsibility to make sure you do all of your calculations correctly, and that can get incredibly, bloody tedious at times. I mean, you say, “I just want to get my characters from point A to point B. I don’t really care if it takes five days or eight days.” It’s completely irrelevant for plot purposes, but you still have to do the sums, work out the math and then put it in the story. So, it works both ways.
Aberrant Dreams: Well, you got to go to WorldCon this year. Tell me about it .
Alastair Reynolds: As you know, about once every ten years, WorldCon makes it to the U. K., and this year it was in Glasgow . As nominally a British writer, even though I don’t live in the U. K., I was more-or-less obliged to go along, so we went and had a really good time. It was a very, very good convention. I can’t compare it to many, because I’ve only ever been to one other WorldCon, and that was in San Jose in 2002, but I’ve been to a few smaller conventions. Most have been pretty well organized and have gone pretty smoothly, but occasionally things go wrong; the organization just isn’t there, but WorldCon was excellent.
My only sort of problem with it was that I signed up to do many program events. I was sitting in on a lot of panels; I was doing readings and signings. All that stuff was good fun, but I actually didn’t participate, in any way, as just an audience member. It was about halfway through the convention that I realized that I was missing a lot of good stuff, really fun looking discussions that I couldn’t go to because I was doing something else. So, that was a little frustrating. When I got back, and I started reading all the post mortems about the whole convention, it seemed that all the really exciting stuff was happening when I was someplace else, but it was good.
Aberrant Dreams: Have you read the novel that won the Hugo, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and how do you feel about a definitively fantasy novel winning?
Alastair Reynolds: I’m so behind on big novels, and, although I’ve heard a lot of good things about Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, I can’t see myself getting to it anytime soon. I’m rather disinclined to read really fat books at the moment.
I guess the Hugo is okay, in a sense, because, formally, it is the award for best science fiction or fantasy novel, so you can’t really complain if a fantasy novel wins it. Where I do moan on occasion, is that there are some specifically science fiction awards, where an awful lot of what I would say is categorically fantasy, gets into the awards’ short lists, but the reverse never seems to happen. You know, you never see avowedly science fiction books in fantasy short lists. I generally feel that there are only a couple of awards set up to recognize specifically science fiction, and I feel it is a shame to dilute that by letting books that are clearly fantasy in on the same awards short lists when they also have another bite at the cherry, because there are plenty of specifically fantasy awards as well.
A lot of people say it is very hard [classify a] book as fantasy or science fiction. I say, “No, no, I can tell you! I know!” I’m a little bit fascist about it. I tend to feel that the slightest whiff of fantasy in a book makes it fantasy. Even if your book has many science fictional trappings, if there is magic in there somewhere, that automatically damns it as fantasy.
Aberrant Dreams: We are really excited about Pushing Ice. What about it excites you, and how many first edition copies are you going to print?
Alastair Reynolds: I don’t know what the print run is; I should know, but I don’t have these numbers at hand. I’ll find out eventually. I am excited about it, but I’m also in that phase where I am completely depressed about it, as well, because I have just finished proofreading it. I really loathe and detest proofreading because it’s actually the point at which you can’t change anything. So, you are stuck with all these decisions you made a year ago. It’s always the low point for me; I really hate it.
I wanted to do another book that was about space exploration and first contact, but I wanted to do it in a distinctly different way than was possible in the confines of the Revelation Space universe. I had been thinking about some different angles on the Fermi Paradox and about first contact. It was also the sort of book I wanted to write, which was harking back to stuff like Larry Niven’s Known Space books, where you have a whole bunch of different alien cultures interacting at more or less the same technological level: you can have trade and even warfare, whatever you like, between these different species. Not one of them is massively more advanced than another, so there is no prospect of one culture completely annihilating another.
But, when you start looking at it from the whole Fermi Paradox standpoint, it doesn’t really hang together in any logical way, because if we go out into the universe, and we happen to meet another stellar civilization, chances are that they will have been out there for millions of years, and they are going to be millions of years more advanced than us. We won’t have a lot of common ground. For fictional purposes, however, that is quite dull in my opinion.
In some respects, I suppose it’s a bit like Star Trek, where you have the Romulans and the Klingons and all those other alien factions, bickering over who gets control of the galaxy. I always thought that would be a fun premise if you could work up to it in a hard SF sense without ignoring the Fermi Paradox.
On one level, the whole point of Pushing Ice was to write myself into a position where I had that [premise] set up and established, and that’s more or less the ending of the book. Having gotten there, I’m thinking, what can I do with it now? So, there is some possibility for doing a sequel if I feel like it in a year or two.
If I was going to start with a new universe, which was going to be different from the Revelation Space books, I wanted to do it as different as possible. I didn’t want it to have any whiff of gothic, creepy darkness, or twisted imagery that’s in the Revelation Space books. I wanted to get away from that for Pushing Ice. So, I decided to make it a more contemporary book in that sense. It starts in the very near future, and a lot of the space hardware and politics is recognizably derived from the present.
Aberrant Dreams: That sounds very good. Do you think it’s going to be released on time?
Alastair Reynolds: I hope so. I haven’t heard anything to the contrary. I was in contact with my publisher yesterday, and I understand that the very last proof changes were sent to the typesetter yesterday ( 9/7/05 ). That means we have about six weeks before it actually appears, and I think that’s still feasible, so it should be out somewhere around October 20.
Aberrant Dreams: Why did you change the title of the book?
Alastair Reynolds: When I start writing a book, I need a working title just to focus myself. The narrative hook at the start is that fifty years from now, the year 2057, we have begun the commercial exploitation of the solar system. They are beginning to steer comets back to Near-Earth space so they can be stripped apart and mined for organics, ice, and whatever.
There’s a space ship out there, hopping from one comet to the next, attaching a mass driver onto each comet, so it can chug its way back home. The crew of this ship gets an emergency request to abandon their current mission and go chasing after Janus, which is one of the moons of Saturn. What’s happened is that Janus has suddenly left its orbit and is heading out of the solar system. Everybody realizes that it was, in fact, a sort of alien monitoring machine of some kind that just happened to be disguised as a moon.
On this mining spacecraft, Rock Hopper, they have a bit of a debate, and then agree to go for it. They decide to chase after Janus and get some imagery and data before their fuel constraints mean they have to turn around and come back home.
I called it Chasing Janus, because that’s what happens, but as I got more into the story, the chasing bit only occupied the first third of the book. So I thought, this isn’t really doing the plot justice. Then I hear some rumbles from the marketing department, who said they could not really make Chasing Janus work. I don’t know what they didn’t like about it, but there is an actress in Britain named Samantha Janus, so there may have been some room for confusion there.
Not for the first time, I had to come up with another title. This is sort of standard operating procedure, and I’m perfectly okay about it because sometimes I have a title, but I’m not satisfied with it. I’m perfectly happy to sit and rethink until I come up with a title that seems to work for me as well as for my publisher.
Aberrant Dreams: Often times, books by the same author are made to look very similar, and many of your books also bare this trait. How was the cover for Pushing Ice selected, and do artists bid on opportunities like that?
Alastair Reynolds: With me, they hit on a look for the covers very early on, and they stuck with that ever since, but I had a lot of insight into the creative process they went through before they settled on the final design. The first draft cover for Revelation Space was a very conventional sort of science fiction book cover, and that went back to marketing, who said that it didn’t have enough of an impact. So, they tweaked it a bit, and it got darker and more minimalist, until finally they arrived at the cover that made it onto the book. I really liked the look. I really don’t know what would have happened if I had not liked it. So far, it hasn’t happened.
It takes me about ten months to write a book, so I usually start [writing] about a year before the book is due to appear. That’s when I’m asked to give cover art input, because the artist needs to have time to [create] it. So, the question that usually comes through is, “What does the space ship look like?” even before I said there was a space ship in the story.
With the exception of Century Rain, where we didn’t have a space ship on the cover, they used a British artist named Chris Moore, who’s a very long-established British science fiction and fantasy artist. When I was a kid, I used to buy big coffee table books full of paintings by Chris Moore. For me, it was a big kick to get a Chris Moore cover, even though they used his artwork in the not so traditional way that one would normally use Chris Moore artwork. They essentially just stripped out the space ship and superimposed it on a planetscape. As I said, they made it very minimalist and bleak, but that’s obviously an arrangement that works well for my publisher, and I’m a fan of his work anyway. I’m also a fan of dozens of other science fiction artists, so I’d find it difficult not to be a happy camper.
Aberrant Dreams: Well, the next one might be somewhat difficult, but do you feel Pushing Ice is your best novel to date?
Alastair Reynolds: Ah, with every book I try and do something better, something that maybe I hadn’t done as well in my other books, but I’m always aware that in the same sort of creative process, I’m taking things out that people may like. As I said, I have tried to simplify the plots, and obviously, there are some people who really enjoy multi-stranded, intricate, Byzantine storytelling. So, for some people, it won’t have the intricacy of Chasm City or Revelation Space. It won’t have the twisted, dark imagery of those earlier books either.
At the same time, I feel that I’m trying to strip out anything that resembles padding, because I felt a sort of tendency towards bloating and padding in my earlier books. Not that I was consciously doing it at the time, but when I go back and read them, I feel that they’re somewhat long winded. With Pushing Ice, I wanted to write a story that kicked in on page one and didn’t slow down for the whole book. It’s basically just action and dialogue driven all the way through.
For me, that was what I aspired to do at the time I started writing that book. I felt that I had kicked that box by the time I had finished it, because when I went through and proofread it, it felt very lean compared to the earlier books, which is what I was aiming for. Really, though, I’m not the best judge. All I know is that they all seemed to involve about the same amount of hard work.
Aberrant Dreams: It doesn’t get easier as you go along?
Alastair Reynolds: No, it doesn’t. I mean, you get better at some stuff, obviously. I don’t agonize over every sentence when I’m writing anymore. Now, I just slap it down, and I’m aware that I can deploy my prose without a great deal of effort. I can write a descriptive scene or a dialogue scene without it requiring a great deal of polishing afterwards.
But, then, a lot of other stuff that I certainly wasn’t concerned about five years now occupies my time when I’m writing. I start thinking about thematic and character issues that I was only remotely concerned about when I was writing Revelation Space. One thing that I really tried hard to do in the last three or four books is to work hard on character, because I felt that, even though a lot of people did respond to the characters in the first couple of books, in my view, they were more grotesques than real characters. So, I tried to think hard about character.
That will work for some people, but it won’t work for others. You know, some people are perfectly entitled to respond to the fact that they like those grotesque, over-the-top kind of characters from Revelation Space. I would say that the characters in Century Rain are far more fleshed out and human, but the bottom line is that it is a personal reaction by the reader.
Aberrant Dreams: Well, with Century Rain, because it occurs a little bit in the past, you’ve already developed, in many cases, a perception of people and things that occurred. In the future, you are sort of in the learning mode.
Alastair Reynolds: Yeah. With Pushing Ice, though, which makes it stand apart from the earlier space based novel, is that, as I’ve said, I made a conscious decision that it was going to be a contemporary novel. At least at the start of the book, the attitudes and the mindsets are essentially early twenty-first century. If I could have moved the story even closer to the present day, I would have, but I really felt I needed fifty years to get this comet mining technology into a plausible state of being.
The characters at the start of the book watch CNN, they watch football, they listen to music on MP3 players, and that sort of thing. It’s more grounded in the present day, but they’re out in space aboard a spacecraft, but they’re essentially... You know, if they were making a film of it, they wouldn’t need futuristic costumes. They would just be wearing everyday outfits. They’re just people with everyday viewpoints that we have today.
Aberrant Dreams: Well, maybe Spielberg will give you a call about this one.
Alastair Reynolds: Well, we’ll see. The thing about Pushing Ice is that as the story progresses, we do move forward in time—in quite a weird way, I hope, just to make it interesting. By the end of the book, we’re fifty years later than where the action starts. So, were into characters that have had a lot of time to change and adjust to things. It gets a little more futuristic towards the end of the book. I hope you like it.
Aberrant Dreams: I am eagerly looking forward to it, and I hope it is a success for you in a big way. I think the thing is that you have already proven that you are not one a one-hit wonder. You are somebody we can rely on. You know, if your name is on the book, we can be sure it will be pretty doggone good.
Alastair Reynolds: It is nice to hear that. All I do is try not to be too complacent. For instance, when I started writing Century Rain, I didn’t really want to write another Revelation Space story right then. I felt that if I had wanted to write a Revelation Space book, then I could have written a hundred pages without blinking, because the whole fabric of that universe was in my head. I didn’t need to think about details, timelines, or anything like that.
That would have been the easy option, but I wanted to do a book set in Paris , and that turned out to be enormously harder than I thought it would be. I just suddenly realized, God, I’m going to have to do some research. That was just completely terrifying, and it really held me up for months, being sort of stymied by this huge black hole in my understanding of what had actually happened. With Pushing Ice, again I thought, let’s try to take things in a different direction. We’ll do a space novel, but let’s not make it another carbon copy of the first four books. Having said that, I am going to do another Revelation Space book, but I want to do it in a significantly different way than the first four books.
Aberrant Dreams: When do you plan to come to Atlanta and meet some of your fans?
Alastair Reynolds: I’m always up for it. I tell my publisher that I am always ready to come over to the States, but I do maybe one trip a year to a big convention. I mean, obviously it’s a big country. If I’m in Boston , then that’s not the easiest place to get to if you’re in Atlanta .
Aberrant Dreams: No, it is not. Well, I guess this is the last one. Is there anything you would like to add?
Alastair Reynolds: I don’t think so. I thought about it, but you asked a lot of nice questions that seemed to cover all the bases.
Aberrant Dreams: Well, you were a wonderful person to interview. On behalf of Aberrant Dreams, I opportunity to do this would like to thank you for the interview.
Alastair Reynolds: No problem. I haven’t done that many interviews lately, so it’s no problem at all. This is the first one I’ve done all year, I think.
Aberrant Dreams: Is this the first one you’ve done about Pushing Ice?
Alastair Reynolds: Yeah, I think so.
Aberrant Dreams: I certainly hope Pushing Ice is a success for you and that is receives it due accolades.
Alastair Reynolds: Hey, thank you a lot, and I wish you all the best.
Editor’s note: Alastair Reynolds was an absolute joy to interview. He was very well-read and spoken, but also possessed an edge of humility that belied a man of his credentials and level of success. If at any time you meet this man at a convention, feel free to speak with him. His level of knowledge and his light-hearted nature will surely win you over as well. Join us in the next issue as we present a full review of Pushing Ice
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