Alastair Reynolds - Four Way Interview

Alastair Reynolds is a science fiction writer based in Wales. A former space scientist, he turned from studying pulsars and binary stars to writing fiction, and is now the author of twelve novels and over fifty short stories. He has been shortlisted for the Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke awards and has won the Seiun, Locus and Sidewise awards. His new book is Bone Silence.

Why SF?

It's the form that encompasses all other forms - infinitely adaptable and infinite expansive. It's brash, bold, colourful, disreputable, sneered at, and I love it unreservedly.

Why this book?

This is the conclusion of a trilogy I started a few years ago. It wraps up the adventures of two sisters, Adrana and Arafura, who get drawn into a world of space piracy and treasure hunting millions of years in the future, after our entire solar system has been dismantled and reforged into countless tiny planetoids.

What's next?

Another novel set against the background of my Revelation Space universe, which I've been developing for nearly 30 years. It's not a sequel to anything else but it does have some connective tissue linking it to other books and stories. It's set much nearer to the present than Bone Silence - a mere 800 years in the future.

What's exciting you at the moment?

The dawn of the space age. We're living in it now. When historians look back from a thousand years now, there'll be a few footnotes about Sputnik, Gagarin and Apollo but I don't think the real space age will have been considered to have started until well into the early 21st century.

Comments

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

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In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...

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