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.

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