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

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader. We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard. This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms. On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...

Search This Blog