Question 1 [Not in the video – to see a full introduction of Alastair Reynolds, scroll to the bottom]: You once said that you think of fiction as requiring the intersection of a minimum set of nonobvious ideas. Short stories need at least two, while novels are like stirring stews.
My guess is that for Revelation Space, two of the ideas were: the constraint of non-faster-than-light travel, which hadn’t been really explored in Scifi before, + the existence of the inhibitors being your response to the Fermi Paradox, but can you share with us more about what ideas when into the origin of this book, and when you went back to revising it in 1997, how did you change it to make it ready for publication?
[00:00:03.18] – Alastair Reynolds
…the way that book [Revelation Space] developed was… There wasn’t really much of a plan, and I didn’t really have all my big intellectual ideas about science fiction lined up in my head when I started writing it. So the way I think about writing now is, in a way that’s the end product of having written that novel and a few books after it and a few short stories. So I didn’t really have a clear sense. I didn’t really know what I was doing is the short answer. I knew I wanted to write a science fiction book, and I guess I’d read a lot of science fiction at that point. I had a pretty good understanding of where the field was in terms of the new stuff. And I don’t even know if it’s possible now, but back in the late ’80s, mid to late ’80s, which is when I really started thinking seriously about writing a novel, you could keep up with the field. You could read all the stuff that people were getting excited about. So you could have an overview of what was happening in the genre. I’m not really sure that’s possible now because the field is so diverse, so many more publishing outlets.
[00:01:30.09] – Alastair Reynolds
I can’t imagine that any one person could, say, read all the significant science fiction books that come out in a year, let alone the short fiction. But back then, it felt like you could. There weren’t that many magazines, so you could keep abreast of the short fiction field, and you can see the trends that were developing. I’d been very much excited by, I suppose, the American movement of cyberpunk. So that something that was happening in the early ’80s. So you had the early short stories of William Gibson, and then there’s a bunch of other writers. It was really fresh and exciting science fiction, and it was really about the the world present day, if you like, or the very near future. It wasn’t science fantasy. It wasn’t about space travel. It was about artificial intelligence and genetic engineering and computer networks and things like that. So it felt way more immediate than a lot of the other science fiction that was around at the time. And I really responded to it, and I really felt excited about the possibilities of cyberpunk. But I guess at the same time, I was also deeply in love with big Galactic scale science fiction because I’d grown up reading, apart from Arthur C.
[00:02:51.24] – Alastair Reynolds
Clarke, the other big influence of me growing up was probably Asimov. And I read all these Galactic Empire books and the foundation sequence and all that, and a bunch of other writers who were playing on the same canvas. And I loved that big, expansive scale that you could get from that stuff. And there were some significant, so of space operatic SF novels that came out towards the end of the ’80s that were an important part of the conversation. David Brin was publishing stuff around that as well. But the The big ones for me that really made me think that you could still do something exciting with the form was, first of all, it was Hyperion, which came out right at the end of the ’80s. I think I got hold of a copy in 1990. And then there was Neverness, which is a big science fiction novel by David Zindal, which some of you may have heard of. And that was also round about then. And I remember reading a review of it in Interzone, which was the magazine where I was first published. And it was the review that made me want to go and order the book.
[00:04:03.13] – Alastair Reynolds
I went to my bookshop and I put an order in it, and then they got hold of it. Otherwise, it probably wouldn’t have appeared on the shelves, but I got hold of an issue of it as soon as it was published. And then there was also The first science fiction, first venture into science fiction of Ian Banks with Consider Phlebas. That was 1987. Then I think he followed it up with a sequel, Player of Games, also in the ’80s. Then there was use of in the ’90s. There was a lot of stuff going on, but I felt I could see a niche where no one was operating. And that was like, as I think you alluded, there was space opera and there was cyber punk, and there wasn’t an awful lot of crossover between the two. And there certainly wasn’t… No one seemed to be trying to do space opera with slow and the light framework. So I thought maybe there was something I could do in that area of science fiction that hadn’t been done before. So that was really all I had. I didn’t really have a clear strategy, like a five-year plan.
[00:05:10.03] – Alastair Reynolds
I just thought, Hey, I could… It’s more like I’d really like to read a book, and I had a book in my imagination. And seeing as I wasn’t aware that anyone had written such a book, I thought I’d better have a go at writing it myself. And I think a lot of what drives me as a writer is just seeing having that sense of an itch, that, Oh, I’d really like to read something like that, but I’m not aware that anyone’s doing it, therefore I’ll have a go at writing it myself. And that was pretty much the roots of Revelation Space.
[00:05:43.01] – John Knych
And so before… Sorry to jump in, Brandon, before your question, do you remember if you… Because I know this is almost 30 years ago. Did you start writing the space opera aspect, and then when you revised it in 1997, you made it more cyberpunky, or was it just 1997, bringing everything that you would read together to create something new?
[00:06:06.08] – Alastair Reynolds
Well, the origin of that book is messy even for me, because I’d started writing a novella way back in about 1986, so when I was still a student, so I was living in New Castle, and I started writing a novella, and many of the ideas in that novella actually ended up being transplanted into Revelation space. All the stuff about Neutron star supercomputer, that’s all in that novella, and a dead alien race, and space archeologists, and things like that. The roots of it are a little bit muddled. What it was, there was a competition being run by Writers of the Future, which is like an organization that’s affiliated with Scientology and all that. I didn’t really care. I just thought, Well, they’re offering money. It was like $1,000 if you won this novella competition. So that was a lot of money, potentially a lot of money for a student. So I thought I’ll enter it and I’ll maybe have a chance at it, but I overshot. So I wrote this thing that became way too long to submit, and it was heading in the direction of being a novel, but I never finished it. And then I relocated to Scotland at the end of the ’80s, and I had a I have a go at writing a novel, which again incorporates some of the ideas that found a way into a revelation space.
[00:07:36.23] – Alastair Reynolds
But again, that one I never finished. And I went to a publisher’s party just after I’d sold my first short story. So it was in 1990, maybe even 1989. I went to a party, and I met an editor there, and I was introduced to the editor by the editor of the magazine, and he said, Oh, this is Al, and we bought I have a couple of stories off him. He’s showing promise. And this editor said to me, Well, are you working on a novel? I said, Well, yeah, I’ve got a novel I’ve been working on over the summer. She said, Well, send me some sample chapters. And I said, Oh, it’s not ready yet. She said, Oh, send me them. And so I printed off three chapters of this thing, sent it to her, and then she read it and the synopsis, and then came back to me and said, You’ve got potential, but you’re not there There’s a lot of development needed before you got the chops to sell a novel. I took it on the chin. I thought, Yeah, she’s probably right. I didn’t even feel I was ready to be a writer at that point.
[00:08:44.14] – Alastair Reynolds
I could It was quite a short story, but a novel was a much bigger undertaking. So again, I sat on that early prototype of Revelation Space. I abandoned it, knowing that I needed more time to find myself as a writer. And then I moved abroad. So there was another reset. So in 1991, I went to live in the Netherlands. And moving to another country, there was a lot of stuff I had to take care of in my personal life before I could think about writing, when it was my first proper job, and I had to adjust to living in a foreign country. I had to start taking language lessons. Couldn’t even drive, so I had to start taking driving lessons and cook for myself for the first time and just generally take care of lots of lots of aspects of life. So again, there was a period, probably about a year before I felt sufficiently settled to begin to think about writing again. And that’s when I really started work on what I would say is properly the first draft of a revelation space. I didn’t bother trying to make use of anything I’d written up until that point.
[00:09:55.00] – Alastair Reynolds
I just said, Well, I know the ideas are all in my head, and I know what I’ve tried to write, and I know where it went, where it I didn’t go. So I’m just going to sit down with a blank piece of paper. And it was literally… I didn’t have access to a computer, even though I’d used a computer before, I didn’t have access to one then. So it was back to using a manual typewriter. And I thought, Well, this is good in a way because it’s like a fresh break. It’s like a clean break. I’m not referring back to old word processor files. I’m just starting afresh. Let’s just see where it goes. So I really started writing what became Revelation Space in about 1992. And I put as much effort as I could into it over about 18 months in the evenings. And then I finished a draft of it in early ’94, printed it out, got a few friends to read it. And then I, I don’t know, I knew it wasn’t there yet, and I lost interest in it and fiddled around with a few other projects. And as you said, in 1997, I had a renewed desire to make something of it.
[00:11:07.17] – Alastair Reynolds
So I had a period of unemployment which helped as well. So I had the time to, first of all, get this typed manuscript onto a computer, tighten it up a bit more, and then prepare three sample chapters. So again, I did that thing of sending it to an editor. And then there was a period of two years, really mostly because the publishing company was going through a bit of a turmoil itself. So they were being taken over and they weren’t allowed to acquire any material. But it actually worked to my advantage because it meant I could just get on with other stuff in that two years. So when they finally came back to me at the start of 1999 and said, We’re interested in talking to you about publishing this book, even though it needs work, the next question was, Have you written anything else? I said, Well, yeah, I wrote another novel last summer, which is in the same universe. And that’s when they got really interested because I think they could see, I’m not a one-trick pony, because I think they probably deal with a lot of writers who’ve only… They’ve got one novel in them, and maybe that’s their baby, but they haven’t really got big plans beyond that.
[00:12:16.07] – Alastair Reynolds
Whereas I had ideas for other books, so they were interested. So that helped. Everything just worked to my advantage, that delay, and off it went.
[00:12:28.06] – John Knych
Thank you. Now, thank you for sharing that backstory. I mean, it’s just a masterpiece. And what’s surprising is it’s considered a science fiction masterwork classic. When I saw this, I thought, wait, he’s still alive.
[00:12:49.17] – Alastair Reynolds
I know. Obviously, it’s not going to be a big secret if I say I can see some flaws in that book because I’ve lived with it, I wrote the thing, I’ve seen it from both sides. And to me, I’m very proud of it in the sense that it was my first novel, and it did well and it’s still in print, and it developed a readership for me that meant I could have some success as a writer over time. But at the same time, I know it’s not… I could point to 20 other books from 1999 or 2000, I think, a better than Revelation Space. But I’m not going to shoot myself in the foot by denying the advantages that come with having a Masterworks edition or something like that. So I’m very happy that it has that afterlife. And it’s been in print ever since, which is really something not to be taken for granted at all. But it does blow my mind slightly. To me, it feels like yesterday when I was working on it.
[00:13:58.00] – John Knych
Excellent, Brandon. I’ve monopolized this. You’re good to ask a question.
[00:14:02.23] – Brandon
First of all, I want to say I’m a huge fan. Thanks. It really means a lot when you take time out of your day to speak with us.
[00:14:11.11] – Alastair Reynolds
It’s a pleasure. I really appreciate that. Believe me. Like most writers, I’m pretty much a hermit. So when I get a chance to speak to people, I jump at the opportunity.
[00:14:21.16] – Brandon
So I guess my question is, I’ve heard in other interviews that you’ve said you’re either taking a break or moving on from the Revelation Space Universe. So after all the novels and stories you’ve written, do you feel like you accomplished what you wanted to in the series?
[00:14:43.03] – Alastair Reynolds
Again, I see it from I can only see it from my side of the creative process. And to me, it’s like a big, messy thing, that inconsistent, sprawling thing that didn’t have a plan. And as Jack said, When people started talking about it as a series, I resisted that a little bit because I think when you talk about something like Game of Thrones, where you have a narrative arc that’s proceeding towards some conclusion, people think there’s always going to be a book that rounds everything off. That was never part of the plan. It was just like, I’ve got this future history in my head, bits of it anyway, and I’d like to write a story here and a story there and a story There’s a lot of things that are there, and they might have some connective tissue between them. They might not. But it’s not going to be a linear thing that develops in a way that it’s like a multi-arc TV series, a multi-season TV series. There’s not going to be a clear beginning and a clear I went into it. I always felt I could step away from it at any point.
[00:15:50.22] – Alastair Reynolds
I think it was just before COVID, I can’t… I wrote Machine Vendetta sorry, not Machine Vendetta, Inhibitor Phase, which is returns to the core story of the nostalgia for the infinity and all that. And that had been on the back burner for a long time, that book. And I thought, Well, to me, that provided some closure to some of the narrative threads that I’ve been developing over those books. And then I’ve written the book that rounds off the narrative timeline of the Prefect subseries within that universe. And it’s not It’s not so much that I hate it and don’t want to write it again. It’s just I felt I’ve done enough of it lately. And I never wanted to be… When I first started setting out in science fiction, I had this idea that I’d write loads of different books that would all be different from each other and try loads of different sub-genres and different narrative modes. And I still want to be like that. I don’t want to be defined by one thing. So I’m very grateful for the fact that the series is there, and I’ve been able to dip in and out But I had a sense, particularly over the last few years, that I wanted to concentrate on shorter, more independent novels because they can provide a challenge to me as a writer.
[00:17:12.19] – Alastair Reynolds
I’ve got to do something different and self-contained with them. So for me, it felt like a good point to just step away from the Revelation space stuff for a while. But I’ve tried to say it’s not like I’ll never write another story in that universe, but I’ve got no plans for the next I never think more than a year ahead anyway, so I just know that right now I’m not thinking about anything in that universe.
[00:17:36.13] – Brandon
Well, I’m excited for anything you write, so I’m eagerly awaiting your next- Oh, thank you.
[00:17:42.17] – Alastair Reynolds
Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. At the end of the day, a lot of what I write is space opera. And I think when I’m in that mode, I have the same amount of fun as when I’m writing the Revelation Spacebooks. So I get the similar kicks out of writing other stuff that I do from writing the Revelation Space stuff. But I also want to write things that are maybe set on Earth or in the near future, or maybe shade a little bit into fantasy things I couldn’t do within the framework of the Revelation spacebooks. The other thing is it just gets bloody hard. When you’ve got a future history, you’re looking for little, I think it was narrative airspace where you can slot in another story, but it gets more and more challenging just finding a place where you can do that without tangling over yourself with things you’ve set up or foreshadowed in other stories. So it does get a little bit harder as time goes on to find that possibility to slot in a new story. And I’ve never felt the need to go back and explain every single part of the world building or the backstory.
[00:18:57.22] – Alastair Reynolds
I like to leave a lot of it unresolved and implied rather than concretized.
[00:19:05.24] – Alastair Reynolds
Thank you, Brandon. I actually got an advanced copy of your novel that’s from Subpress, The Dagger.
[00:19:14.06] – Alastair Reynolds
Dagger, yeah. Yeah, okay.
[00:19:15.15] – Brandon
I did read that a couple of weeks ago. I loved it.
[00:19:19.18] – Alastair Reynolds
Oh, cool. Thank you. Well, that was a… I’m really happy you say that. What happened was, so I finished about this time last year, I finished Halsey & Years, which is my next proper novel. And I took a little break after that, and then I started working on what I thought was going to be my next book, which was going to be a standalone a bass opera, and I had a title for it and a plot and everything like that. And I was struggling to find my way into it a little bit. And then various things happened. I went to the World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, and that was a bit of a break away from writing, and then we had another trip. And when I came back from all that, I couldn’t reconnect with the thing I was trying to write, and I thought, I really need to reset myself. And I thought, I’ve got to be writing something. I can’t just sit faffing around all day. So I’d had this idea for a medieval thing with a medieval vibe, which was really just going to be a short story. I thought I’ll write that because I’m at least I’m writing something.
[00:20:27.00] – Alastair Reynolds
So that’s where that came from. And once I’d finished that, then I had a bit of enough distance so I could look at the thing I’d been working on or trying to work on. I thought, actually, that’s just not going to happen now. So I need to think of working on something else. So I switched my plans over once I’d written.
[00:20:47.23] – Brandon
Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Do you know when the official release date is for that?
[00:20:53.17] – Alastair Reynolds
I thought it was August, possibly September, but I’ve seen October. I would say it’s a little bit up in the air at the moment. All I know is I’m doing a number of signature sheets for it, and they’re on their way to me. It certainly won’t happen until they’ve signed them, but the wheels, that’s already happening, so they’re on their way from subpress. Normally, when I’ve signed them and sent, they ship them back, then there’s not much else to do other than they go printer and they get composited into the book. But I think they got… I don’t think it’ll be earlier than August.
[00:21:37.16] – Brandon
I’ll definitely be purchasing one of those.
[00:21:40.21] – Alastair Reynolds
Where are you based, Brandon?
[00:21:42.22] – Brandon
I’m actually in Missouri, which is Okay. The United States.
[00:21:47.01] – Alastair Reynolds
Okay. Because Subpressed are based in Michigan. Okay. And I did visit… There was a convention that was in Minneapolis, Not Minneapolis, sorry. I’ve been there as well. It was near Detroit, but I can’t quite remember whether… But anyway, they, Subpress, hosted me at that convention for a few days, and it was really cold as well. I remember that. But they’re really great people, and they’ve been really supportive of me over easily a decade. It’s Bill Schafer and everyone at Subterránea.
[00:22:26.22] – Brandon
Yeah, I’ve got their additions of your Revelation Yeah.
[00:22:31.03] – Alastair Reynolds
Well, it’s really… I’m really happy that they’re doing those, and then they keep pushing forward with them. So for me, it’s a very enjoyable, mutually profitable relationship with Subterránea. So I’m happy that that exists, and I’m happy that we can keep working with each other.
[00:22:55.17] – John Knych
Alastair, do you prefer Al?
[00:22:57.13] – Alastair Reynolds
Yeah, to my friends. Yeah, you’re my friends. So on the topic since Brandon is in Missouri, what do you think- Where are you, Jack?
[00:23:05.19] – JOhn Knych
I’m in Paris.
[00:23:07.15] – Alastair Reynolds
Okay, cool. All right. Okay. So it’s not terribly… I mean, Brandon, Christ, man, you must be getting up really early today.
[00:23:15.24] – BrANDON
8: 00 AM.
[00:23:16.24] – Alastair Reynolds
8: 00 AM. Oh, no. Sorry about that.
[00:23:20.04] – JOHN KNYCH
I think that’s why we have lower 10 is not expected because a lot of Americans in the chat, but this is recorded, so I’ll share it with them later. Yes. But even though I’m in Paris, Al, I’m American. I’ve been here for the last year.
[00:23:36.18] – Alastair Reynolds
Where are you from originally in the States?
[00:23:39.02] – JOHN KNYCH
Syracuse, New York.
[00:23:40.24] – Alastair Reynolds
Okay.
[00:23:42.21] – JOHN KNYCH
Average city in New York. But what do you think of European versus American Sci-Fi? Meaning American Sci-Fi like Andy Weir, Ann Leckie, Ted Chiang. I don’t know if you read them versus Adrian Tchaikovsky. I was recently wondering whether there’s an essay to write, like looking at the two worldviews of European Sci-Fi and American Sci-Fi. Have you thought of that, or have any opinions on?
[00:24:13.11] – Alastair Reynolds
Well, I thought of it, but only in a very shallow context, in that when I was reading science fiction, I just read omniverously, and I wasn’t really that bothered. I I would say a lot of the science fiction I was reading, even if it was written by people from the British Isles, was written in an American idiom. When I was growing up, there was Clark, and his stuff was internationalist and outlook, and often had American protagonists. Then I liked James White, who was a Northern Irish writer. But again, they were writing… They had a view on the American magazine markets as well. I think they were Just to earn their bread and butter, they were often writing broadly in an American idiom. And the writers who emerge in the ’60s with a distinct British voice like J. G. Ballard and Michael Mohawk, and all the other significant writers of the British New Wave. I didn’t really connect with them until way later in my reading. Probably later than I should have, but I wasn’t really reading that distinctly British strain of science fiction until my own tastes and habits as a writer and a reader were already fully formed.
[00:25:39.14] – Alastair Reynolds
My first couple of stories were in a British science fiction magazine, Interzone, as you mentioned, and I had a long association with Interzone, and to some extent, I still feel that that association is in place. But the next thing for me, obviously, I felt in order to prove myself as a writer, I wanted to get Americans interested in what I was writing, because to me, that was the hallmark of success. You’ve made it if you can sell stories to the States. So I put a lot of energy into breaking into the American market in the ’90s, and And my main target was an editor called Garden of the Zouar, who unfortunately passed away a few years ago. But he was the editor of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, which I’d seen on New Stand, so I knew it existed. And he was also the guy who compiled the year’s best science fiction. And when I started taking real interest in contemporary science fiction, again in the mid ’80s, it was his curating of that collection that shaped my tastes as a writer, as a reader. So a lot of the writers that I connected with in the ’80s, of that newer generation of writers were filtered through Garner’s tastes.
[00:26:58.05] – Speaker 1
So I Whatever he liked, I liked, basically. I came to regard him as a reliable barometer of what was good in science fiction. So I really wanted to impress him. It took a while, but eventually, he did buy some of my stories. And then I had a And there’s a race association with the American market after that. I’ve never really, consciously or not, I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly British writer, because I’ve lived abroad for a very long time anyway. I lived in the Netherlands. So my outlook is on that level, it’s European rather than Anglo-centric. But I’ve also always felt quite comfortable in the American idiom as a writer. I mean, a lot of my favorite science fiction writers were American. So I feel, speaking for myself, I’m quite happy to swim in both seas, if you and not be overly concerned about where my roots are as a writer.
[00:28:10.08] – Speaker 2
Alister, it’s a platitude to say that Sci-Fi is prophetic and predicts the future. But in your Revelation Space series, you have beta simulations, AI, neural links, all these things that we’re seeing happen. Do you follow AI progress now, and the science and what’s being published? And I recently read two days ago, there’s a New York Times technology writer who said, We will achieve AGI by 2027. Do you think we’re on the cusp of an AI revolution? Are you fearful of AI? What’s your current opinion on that?
[00:28:54.23] – Alastair Reynolds
Well, it’s an interesting question. Question to, how do I position myself? Because I wrote a bunch of, as you say, there’s a load of ideas in Revelation space that touch on ideas about artificial intelligence, uploaded consciousness, and how we might differentiate between different grades of consciousness. But none of it was based on any real scholarly thinking. Over 20 years since I wrote that, I kept an eye on what was going on in artificial intelligence research through the lens of popular science. Nothing more deep than that. I was very interested in, shall we say, We’ve progressed towards AI in the classical sense, in that people were focused on neural networks for learning and the idea that we were moving towards, how 9000 version of AI, where you have a computer or a network that is actually emulating consciousness on some level. But the discourse around AI now is, to me, it’s been hijacked by the debate around large language models, which are really… I mean, as sophisticated as they are, they’re really just a very, very amped up predictive text generator, aren’t they? I mean, I see it as interesting. It’s technically impressive, but it’s not what I would have called AI at any point over the last 20 or 30 years if you’d pin me down.
[00:30:48.04] – Alastair Reynolds
But perhaps that’s perhaps what, as you say, when we get AGI, if we get it, will it emerge from just further developments in large language models, or is it going to come from some completely different direction? I don’t have enough sense of what’s going on in the real world. I’m only an amateur, and I only read about AI developments on a popular science level. And I’ve had to be really frank with people about this because I think just this year I’ve been invited to give speeches and panels at three different AI conferences. And I said, I don’t know shit about this stuff. I’m just making it up. And to me, AI is In the sense that I’ve been using it in my books, it’s an interesting set of narrative ideas that can generate stories and can create moral conflicts with the characters that generate narrative possibility. But there’s no deeper thinking to it than that. I would feel like a bit of a fraud if I was to put myself in a public space and claim that I had some There was some deeper authority to my thinking than that. I’ve always been resistant to the…
[00:32:21.11] – Alastair Reynolds
I mean, generally speaking, I think a lot of science fiction writers fall into the… They’re too easily lured into becoming guru gurus on a particular topic. And I’m never going to be a guru about anything. What I know is probably no deeper than the average reader who just consumes a bit of popular science. I think I can refract it through fiction, and I can play with those ideas in a way that is fertile and creates interesting storytelling possibilities. But that doesn’t mean I have any basis to speak authoritatively on these topics. And AI is the current one. I’ve had to just say, look, sorry, but I’m vaguely interested in AI, but I don’t have anything really useful to contribute to the conversation at the moment. And there’s so much noise. There’s so much heat around the discussion. I think the last thing you need is yet another uninformed opinion, which was just what my opinion would be at this point.
[00:33:23.23] – John Knych
So you’re not going to pull a Ron Hubbard and create a Scientology cult around your books?
[00:33:30.07] – Alastair Reynolds
No. Just on a pragmatic level, I could point to a few dozen science fiction writers whose careers I looked at from a distance, and they had a lot of success, and then they got sucked into this, the guru thing, where you’re more talking about science fiction ideas than actually writing science fiction. And if you’re not careful, that just takes over and you fall silent as a writer. And I thought, I don’t want that. I still feel like I’ve got a lot of energy in myself as a writer, and I’ve got lots of ideas I want to play with. So I just want to… I’m very interested in these ideas, but all I can do is play with them through the lens of fiction rather than just stand up and prognosticate about AI. It’s not just that. It’s also like space travel or climate change or genetic engineering. I have nothing really useful to say as an individual. Everything that I might have of worth is what I put into my fiction. Where do you stand on it? Do you think we’re heading? Do you think that the AGI is something that will happen in that time frame?
[00:34:39.04] – John Knych
There’s an essay I recommend to both of you called your Your Romantic AI Lover Will Change You. It’s published a week ago, New Yorker by Jaron Lanier. A very interesting man who works for Safari. It felt like he has his finger on the pulse right now. But I think, and actually, I was around, I wanted to say this to you at some point in this conversation that I read a book of your short stories, and there’s one of them. The title it’s escaping me now, but it’s where you have the giant machine on Mars that does work. And then there is a girl that gets lost, or she ends up on the machine. Anyway, there’s just a little detail on that, which is a sign of a great writer, as it gives me ideas to explore on my own. And she was doing a journal with her sister, who I think was back on Earth, in that they would both upload to the journal and be able to stay in touch, because the time lag with Mars would prevent the relationship from deteriorating, but uploading to the journal allow them to stay in touch. And I thought that’s what’s going to happen very soon, where people create these journals, AIs that will be We like friends or will just be helpers.
[00:36:05.00] – Alastair Reynolds
I think that’s the- I love the New Yorker, and I had a subscription to it, but after a while, I just couldn’t keep up with it.
[00:36:11.16] – Alastair Reynolds
But I keep thinking I should resubscribe. But you’re probably aware of this article. I think it was in The Atlantic a few weeks ago where there’s a library of pirated material that Metta had been using to scraping to train its AI. This is not in dispute. What the Atlantic have done is provide you a portal so you can search that library now to see what is in there. It doesn’t unambiguously mean that material was in there at the point it was scraped. They can’t say that for sure. But 20 of my novels are in there, these 20 of my titles, I think maybe more. And I’m really infuriated by this. And I mean, just this morning. So I have a very hands-off approach to social media. I try not to use it any more than I absolutely need to. So I don’t have a Facebook account, don’t use Twitter. But I have been forced into using WhatsApp for, I would say, community organization. So my running group, all the coordination is done on WhatsApp. So if I took myself off WhatsApp, I wouldn’t be able to get involved on the volunteering side of that. I’m in a community theater group, all our coordination is done on WhatsApp.
[00:37:42.24] – Alastair Reynolds
And there’s other groups that I’m involved in that there’ll be some social cost to me from disengaging with WhatsApp. And I’ve accepted it like, Okay, so it’s part of meta, but it’s not Facebook, and it’s just a messaging tool. But this morning when I I was a bit puzzled. I hadn’t had any WhatsApp notifications for 24 hours, so I was fiddling around with it. And it immediately put into the top of my WhatsApp timeline Meta’s AI tool. I was really annoyed by this because I thought it was like, it’s really in my face now. This utility that I use to communicate with my friends is now innerts, strictly linked into this other aspect of Metai that has been meta, that has been scraping my intellectual content to train its AI. So I had a real spasm, and if I could get off it, I would, but the personal cost to me would be too high. And I was looking around other alternatives to WhatsApp that aren’t meta, and of course, Signal came up straight away, and we all know about that now. But the trouble is, it’s no good me being on Signal if everybody else has to be on as well or it’s useless.
[00:39:05.17] – Alastair Reynolds
So I can’t suddenly say to all my people in the running community, Hey, guys, I know you don’t personally have a problem with Facebook and Zuckerberg and Metta, but would you mind coming off that platform and joining me on Signal or whatever else? It’s just not going to happen. So I just have to suck it up for now and just take it. But it really annoys me on a profound level. There It’s like some movement towards some legal action against Metta for the scraping of this content. There’s a number of high-profile writers in the UK who are calling on the government to take action. But I’m just a low-level nobody in this whole thing. There’s nothing I can say or do that would have any influence on it. All I can do is just feel deep moral outrage.
[00:39:54.24] – John Knych
Brandon, I’ll bring it back to you. Sometimes it’s all we can do is just be pissed off and just move Yeah, I agree.
[00:40:01.20] – Brandon
It’s just a language model.
[00:40:08.13] – Alastair Reynolds
I’m not an absolute. Where I see AI will have genuine utility, and there are beginning to be steps in that direction is in looking at, say, large scale medical databases and picking out correlations that maybe no human could ever detect, and that might lead to different therapeutic approaches. And I think there’s already been some little advances in that direction that we can attribute to AI. So I’m not against the LLM model of AI in its entirety. I think there are good social applications, but where I am obviously against it is where it begins to erode the creative process we get between the human creator and the human consumer. I have this perception that if you look at, say, Amazon unlimited, Kindle unlimited, there’s a substantial market out there for fiction that is just at the basic level, the most basic landfill quality fiction. There are people out there who just want to read anything, and they don’t care if it’s… It just has to meet some minimum criteria, and they’ll read it. And to me, that’s really upsetting as a creator, because you try and craft every sentence. You try and work to some aspiration of quality.
[00:41:59.14] – Alastair Reynolds
And there’s There’s a market out there for basically just churn or slop, and AI can make that 20 million times worse. So when the AI flop just takes over everything, whether there’s still enough… Still an economic model that allows actual creators to produce actual content and have it met by a consumer, I don’t know. It probably worries me more than it would have a few years ago. I used to think that the one career that was basically safe from automation was anything in the creative arts. But AI can generate stuff that’s passable, whether it’s art or prose?
[00:42:51.21] – Brandon
There is quite a bit of backlash in the book community on AI, so I’m hopeful that it take over.
[00:43:01.22] – Alastair Reynolds
Yeah. I don’t want to read anything that’s got any AI media. I don’t want to look at AI-generated art. I don’t want to look at AI-generated movies. I don’t want to listen to AI-generated music. And I don’t care if I can’t tell the difference. I still don’t want it. I don’t want it in my life. I want a living, breathing human being in that creative process at some point.
[00:43:24.10] – Speaker 3
Yeah. I think there’s enough people out there that feel the same that hopefully will stop it from taking over.
[00:43:31.13] – Alastair Reynolds
Hopefully. We’re in a bit of a wave at the moment. There’s probably a bit of a blip and an overreaction, and we’ll be the next… We’ll all be worried about something else in a few years time.
[00:43:44.04] – John Knych
Yeah, I agree with that. And I think to a value, part of a value of a work of art is the knowledge that it came from a human, a soul that was able to arrive at these emotions that they’re sharing with you. So many people love artists because they know their story. Van Gogh’s life is infused in his art. And if you didn’t know who is his life story, the art experience with the art would be completely different. Yeah, I totally agree. Which AI has none of that.
[00:44:27.05] – Alastair Reynolds
I just hope there’s a percentage of people who feel the same way, and it’s enough to give me whatever’s left to my career. I can cruise on that percentage.
[00:44:38.08] – John Knych
Speaking of your career, Al, the movies, are there any of Some of your work optioned? Is there a film possibility? Because your work is cinematic in a way that I think it’s cinematic. And when I saw Dune, I’m not a huge fan Man of Dune. I know the Sci-Fi community, really. Dune, for me is boring. What do you mean?
[00:45:06.24] – Alastair Reynolds
The text or the adaptation?
[00:45:10.13] – John Knych
The text. That’s just my own personal opinion. But yours just has… I don’t know. Your Revelation Space, to me, just has more tension. So has there been movie options for- The way I say it, there’s a conversation.
[00:45:29.14] – Alastair Reynolds
There’s always a conversation going on about Revelation Space, the bigger universe of books, and then a lot of my other stuff as well. The particular conversation about Revelation Space has been going on for about probably way more than a decade now with the same partners. But they’re not the people who can make it happen, if you like. They’re the people who have to talk to other people, get them infused. And it’s something that it could happen at any point, but it could also not happen. I have no real traction on that conversation. There’s been a couple of times where What happened a few years ago was there was very, very strong interest in adapting one particular short story from the Revelation Space Universe by a film company. They had all the right credentials, and they also had a strong track record of whenever they had optioned anything, they would make it. There was very little doubt that it would make it, but they were only interested in that one story. And on my side of the creative conversation with my agent and other people. We didn’t want to separate it out from the Revelation Space universe because then you start fragmenting everything, and then you devalue the enterprise as a whole.
[00:46:55.18] – Alastair Reynolds
So you make it harder for anyone else to take an interest in it. So we backed away from that. So there’s been things we’ve not done where we could have, but I think they’ve been smart strategic decisions in the long run. For myself, I’m pessimistic about the chances of it ever happening. I think I’ve just been around the block too many times. I’ve had too many conversations, and I know that no matter how well meaning the people you work with, it doesn’t mean that they can push the or over the hill. And it depends how other science fiction properties are doing at the same time. If science fiction is having a boom, then obviously it makes it more likely that someone might take an interest in Revelation Space. But if these big, expensive productions are struggling to find an audience, then they’re not necessarily going to be looking for another one. And it is expensive. No matter how you look at it, Revelation Space would be quite an expensive production to do. But there is still a conversation. The conversation is still going on. From my point of view, it’s pretty positive because I get the renewal money, the option money is very nice.
[00:48:13.15] – Alastair Reynolds
So just the fact that there are people out there who remain interested is a source of income for me, hopefully in a non-cynical way. But I’m perfectly happy with that status quo.
[00:48:25.21] – John Knych
Yeah, personally, I’d love to see Denis Villneuve make a Relevation Space because his next movie is Rendezvous with Rama.
[00:48:32.07] – Alastair Reynolds
Yes. Well, I don’t know. Occasionally, you get a nibble of interest. You hear that someone likes your stuff, but I don’t know if I’m on that guy’s radar at all.
[00:48:45.12] – John Knych
You’re the type of writer-artist that you let your agent navigate all that in that you’re not pushing your agent to say, Hey, can you find…
[00:48:57.03] – Alastair Reynolds
No, not really. No. Occasionally, I So I have a literary agent, then I have a film agent, and a film agent will… They get a lot of inquiries that are not serious, if you know what I’m talking about. So I’m not always introduced to the conversation until it’s worthwhile introducing me. But yeah, I don’t go… Maybe I should be more pushy. I don’t know. It’s just not in me to put myself out there, which is a bit of a drawback these days because I think more and more as writers, we are expected to basically be our own PR machines. But there you are, it just doesn’t fit with my outlook and my personality as a writer, it’s just what will happen will happen. The other thing is I don’t tend to talk about these things unless there’s something worth mentioning. We had the two Netflix adaptations for Love, Death, robots. And again, that deal took about seven years before they actually made the animations. It was a hell of a long time, but I never mentioned it until there was actually a trailer out there. I thought, Well, now it’s actually going to happen. But There’s been…
[00:50:16.06] – Alastair Reynolds
I mean, I had probably about eight or nine years ago, it was real interest in doing a TV series based on a short story, not Revelation Space, but it looked really likely that it would happen. And I got really excited about it. And then I had that crash where it over about a year, it just fizzled off. And I thought, I’m never getting on that emotional roller coaster again. I’m just going to be detached and disinterested about the whole process. And that’s a much healthier place to be.
[00:50:47.13] – John Knych
Yes. And to swing away from the vanity film, I want to make sure I get this last content question. The role of accident and error in your work. You just mentioned the love, death, and robots. The beyond the Achilles rift, right? Person by accident just ends up another part. And when I read the beginning of Revelation Space, Cory’s timeline, she’s separated from her husband by accident, and it’s just spent on this epic journey. Is that this idea? Have you consciously grappled with it? Or has the idea of an accident leading to these long journeys- Yeah, I don’t think I’ve really thought about that before, but I’m sure you’re right.
[00:51:43.14] – Alastair Reynolds
I’m sure it’s a theme that’s You could find it in other short stories and novels of mine. And I guess it’s a reflection of this idea that the universe just doesn’t care. It’ll do things to us, whether we’re good people or bad people. And you can’t petition it, you can’t with the universe. It’s just going to do this stuff to you, and then you just have to find a way to live with the consequences. I guess I do enjoy that as a narrative driver. And I guess I probably enjoy it in other forms of writing as well. I like that sense of the intubation of just cruel fate and how you deal with it afterwards.
[00:52:26.09] – John KNych
Yeah, because existentially, it’s a twist because you your novels and stories have such scope that these little things the universe do just lead to rabbit holes and long journey that you think, Yeah.
[00:52:47.14] – Alastair Reynolds
The danger is now, what happens is if I become aware of a trope in my writing, I think, Oh, I can’t use that again now. But I think there’s probably a lot mileage in that. I’m trying to think about what I’m writing at the moment. I think even Daga Rinvichi has got an element of that in that the protagonist stop for They make an uneventful stop along a country road because one of them needs a toilet break, and then they meet a soldier. Now, if they hadn’t stopped, they wouldn’t have met the soldier, and then the soldier has a favor for them to do, and then everything spirals from that moment. But it’s a random encounter in the night that is just driven by sheer coincidence. So I think that’s probably- Yeah.
[00:53:38.19] – John Knych
And it connects to what you said about Revelation Space, how that wasn’t really planned, you said. It Was this pulling from what you want to read with what you’ve already read.
[00:53:51.08] – Alastair Reynolds
Yeah. It’s just a sense that, oh, there’s an area of science fiction that no one’s written into, and I’d like to try and do something in that area. That governs a lot of what I do. I mean, a lot of the creative itches that propel me as a writer just come from a sense that you have a vague sense that there’s a shape of story that you’ve not seen before, or a setting, or a mood. It probably has been done before, but you’re just not aware of it. And it’s enough of a motivator. It gets you working through the creative process until you produce something. And then you will inevitably put your own original stamp on whatever you’ve produced for better or worse. You’ve created some piece of art that wouldn’t have existed before.
[00:54:33.14] – JOhn KNych
Yes. So I know I promised an hour, Al. I don’t want to take up too much of your time. You can have more time if you’d like.
[00:54:42.23] – Alastair Reynolds
Okay. Excellent.
[00:54:44.03] – John Knych
Because I know I don’t.
[00:54:45.21] – Alastair Reynolds
We had some trouble at the start as well, so I’m well aware of that. So yeah. Thank you. If you want another half hour, it’s not a problem. Okay.
[00:54:54.02] – John Knych
Super. Brandon, I have two, three more questions, or do you have a question you want to ask?
[00:55:00.12] – Brandon
Sure. You have a lot of creative characters in Revelation Space, in particular the Hyperpigs. How did you come up with the Hyperpigs? Was it inspired by something in particular? Why pigs?
[00:55:18.09] – Alastair Reynolds
Well, again, it just reflects that a lot of my stuff is just not planned. I was writing a short story. We’re going back to about 1997, and I hadn’t sold a novel at this point, but I had sold a few stories to Interzone magazine. There’d been a period where they weren’t buying anything off me. And then I loosened up as a writer, and I stopped agonizing over every word. And that was like a breakthrough. And suddenly, everything I wrote did sell. It was really weird. It’s like the less I fret over it, the more I’m saleable when my material comes. So anyway, I had to spell them where they were buying a load of stuff off me. I booked myself to go on a writing retreat. So there’s this thing called Milford, which is an American institution. It’s like a writer’s workshop where everyone meets as equals for a week or a long weekend, and you bring some material that you’re working on, and you just sit in around Robin and you critique it. There’s this complete democracy of Union, and they started a satellite of Milford in the UK. I only ever went to one Milford, but I felt it was like a rite of passage that I wanted to do as a writer.
[00:56:41.09] – Alastair Reynolds
So I signed up to go to Milford, and of course, you have to take something with you. So I had this idea that I would write a short story, but I really struggled. And eventually, I took a messy, unformed, fragmented manuscript to Milford, and it was an early draft of the story Galactic North, which I did eventually sell to Interzone. I’d read a few, should we say prototypes for that story in other types of science fiction story. And there’s a particular story by Joe Helderman, which I really loved. It’s a short story, and it’s called Tricentennial. And he wrote it in probably about 1976 because it was written for this bicentennial year. It was tricentennial. And what I loved about it is it’s a pretty short story, but it spans about 3,000 years, and it’s just like little vignettes, and you’re time jumping from one thing to another, and the scope and scale of it just gets crazy. And I thought, I really like this. And there were a bunch of other short stories that used the same structure of just a massive span of time compressed into a few thousand words, and I loved it.
[00:58:01.09] – Alastair Reynolds
So I thought, I’d really like to write one of those. So that was my attempted Galactic North. And I had to put some space pirates into this story. Everything I wrote at the time, I was trying to not do what everybody else was doing So I thought, Well, I now have space pirates, but I don’t want them to be regular space pirates. I want them to be weird. And I just said, Okay, I’ll make the main spice pirate a genetically engineered pig. So I just threw this in as a random plot in a lot of detail, that there’d been these experiments on uplifting pigs, and they’d created these genetic and engineered pigs, and one of them had gone rogue, and now he was a space pirate in the year 3000 or something. And that was it. There was no real deeper thought to it than that. But by the time I’d written my first novel, and I was starting to market it, and then I’d written the other one in the following summer, and there was a bunch of other bits of short fiction I was working on, I was starting to think about all of this stuff fitting into a future history.
[00:59:01.17] – Alastair Reynolds
I realized that somehow or other, I’ve got the pigs now. The pigs are a part of that future history, so they’ve got to come up, they’ve got to show up in other stories, or it’s a bit weird. I don’t know if they’re mentioning ejapolation space. I think they’re maybe not or are best in passing.
[00:59:20.24] – Johh Knych
The redemption art.
[00:59:24.13] – Alastair Reynolds
I think maybe Chasm City as well is like a throwaway remark, mention of pigs or something like that. But Sure, the big story that really digs into the backstory is redemption art. But it was all because I just created this pig character as a throwaway in a weirdness in a short story. So again, it was just like back to front. There was no There was no deeper thinking beyond that. And then, of course, the pig character. Everybody, for some reason, people like the pig characters. Oh, yeah, Scorpio. He’s our favorite character. And then I created another one in the prefect sequence, Spava, who’s the pig prefect. And he gets lots of good reactions from readers. They like Spava. Somehow I created this thing that I wasn’t really planning on. Then the pig’s become quite a recognizable motif in the Revelation Space universe. But there was absolutely no deep thinking behind it at all. It was just a random weird detail that I thought would make one story cool for about a minute.
[01:00:32.14] – Brandon
Thank you. It worked out. It worked out great.
[01:00:35.15] – Alastair Reynolds
Thank you.
[01:00:37.05] – John Knych
Before Al, we asked you about AI. You shared that you’re not an expert. You’ve been asked to do panels, but you use it for fiction. In the same sense, can you talk to us a little bit about Mars? Because I read this interview of you in The Guardian, where you made me laugh. You called the Mars trilogy as the fuck off Mars. But what surprised me about you is that a lot of sci-fi writers and scientists, for example, the last talk we had with Kim Stanley Robinson. He’s very like, We should not go. There’s all these issues, but you’re fairly open about it, correct me if I’m wrong, that you think we can and should go if we have the ability. What are your thoughts now on humans?
[01:01:26.09] – Alastair Reynolds
Yeah, well, I know Stan pretty well because he’s a great guy and he’s very a nice figure in the science fiction community, and he’s been very kind to me, and I respect his opinions. And my own thoughts are probably not set in stone. But the way I’ve I walk myself around thinking about human activity on Mars, setting aside whether it’s SpaceX and Elon Musk that should be doing this, that’s a separate thing. That speaks to our present at the moment, but taking a more longer term view of whether we should go to Mars. I actually think it wouldn’t be a bad idea if we had a 200-year moratorium where we don’t send anything to Mars, because the risks of In my opinion, there may be a story to be learned about the early history of life in the Solar System on Mars. There may even be life still present there. At the moment, we We’ve possibly contaminated that story a little bit with the exploration we’ve done over the last 50 years, but maybe not to a huge degree, and maybe not at all. It depends how good our sterilization procedures have been. But we only knew as much as we thought we did at the time.
[01:02:47.04] – Alastair Reynolds
Now we know that some of the sterilization procedures weren’t maybe adequate for, say, Viking and things like that. I think in the grand history of the human race, not setting foot on Mars for, say, 200 years while we do a little bit more soul searching and think a little bit more deeply, wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. We’re not saying you can never go there. That’s just not rush. There doesn’t have to be this stampede to put a human presence on every body in the Solar System. I’m not so worried about the moon because by its nature, it’s a sterile surface. But Mars, I think there’s a good argument for just not doing anything for a little while. As a species, we can develop a little bit more maturity, a little bit more wisdom, and a little bit more scientific insight into what would actually be the consequences of exploring Mars. I’m probably more… I think when Stan wrote the original trilogy, I think he was actually a bit of an enthusiast for Martian colonization. I think, okay, he maybe Maybe he wanted to frame the Terraforming as an either or argument so he could have both sides of their debate in the book.
[01:04:04.24] – Alastair Reynolds
I think there was no doubt that he liked the idea of putting human witnesses into this landscape. I understand that impulse. And although I I had no personal desire to go to Mars, I always expected it would happen in my lifetime, and I was excited about that possibility. But I do think maybe it’s just a side effect of getting older, but I do think a little bit of caution wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.
[01:04:30.19] – John Knych
So you don’t feel existential threat for humanity, which is right. Spacex is big thing.
[01:04:37.09] – Alastair Reynolds
Not really, no. My slightly flippant counterargument to that. They say, It’s always this thing about the moment we have all our eggs in one basket and we need to establish a human presence off Earth. But I always think that’s something of a flawed argument because my rebuttal is that every advancement in capability that enables you to put people somewhere else also increases your capability to do harm to them. You never really escape that circle. Sure, we could put people on Mars, but there’d be no guarantee that we couldn’t You could send a nuclear strike to Mars and wipe out the Mars colony, or we could have an epidemic or a nanotechnology meltdown on Mars or something like that, very easily. As soon as you have the capability to put people somewhere else, I think you also have the capability to anihilate them. So I think that eggs in one basket thing is a bit of… It’s a little bit misleading, and I think we have to learn to… We either manage Earth properly and learn how to live on this planet peacefully, or we don’t. And I think proliferating ourselves from the universe is never going to solve that problem.
[01:05:55.06] – Alastair Reynolds
If we can’t live equibly on one planet, then it’s not going to be any better when we live on six planets or 20.
[01:06:03.18] – John knych
Thank you. Brandon, do you have any more questions?
[01:06:07.23] – Brandon
I have a question about your novel Blue-Remembered Earth.
[01:06:12.24] – Alastair Reynolds
Okay.
[01:06:13.19] – Brandon
I really like the African elephant angle.
[01:06:18.02] – Alastair Reynolds
Yeah, cool.
[01:06:19.08] – Brandon
You wonder, are we going to have African elephants in the wild 50 years from now? What What was your process behind that storyline?
[01:06:33.14] – Alastair Reynolds
Well, that book was written out of a real period of personal optimism, I think, and also a sense of the moment that we were in when I wrote it also felt like an optimistic moment. The genesis of the trilogy, broadly speaking, goes back to the first time I ever went to Kennedy Space Center. So way back, I think it was 2007, possibly 2008. But through science fiction, and this is why science fiction is sometimes a wonderful thing, I got to meet someone. We did a panel together, And there was a very nice lady, and she was involved in the shuttle program, and she was involved in crew training. So she’d work with a particular shuttle crew and get them up to speed and familiarize Asian with the ship. And she said to me at the end of the panel, we had a cup of coffee, and she said, Well, if you ever like to see a launch, tell me. I thought, That’s very kind. I’d love to see a launch one day. Well, a few years went by, and then they announced the termination of the shuttle program, which was still a few years in the future, but it was clear that it was going to end at some point.
[01:07:51.08] – Alastair Reynolds
So I wrote back to this friend and said, Well, I’m going to call you on that now because I’d love to see a launch. And there were a few other… I met an astronaut around about the same time who was also involved in the shuttle program, who was a reader. So there were a number of factors playing into my wife and I getting an invitation to go and see a shuttle launch. In fact, we went to Florida, and we didn’t see a shuttle launch because it was scrubbed. In fact, it was scrubbed before we even got on the plane and flew to Florida. We knew it wasn’t going to happen, but we booked our tickets. We thought, Yeah, to hell with it. We’ll go to Florida. So we went to Kennedy Space Center, and we did actually see a launch the year later. That’s another story. But we had a really nice time visiting the Space Center. And this was around the time of the There was a lot of optimism about returning to the Moon by 2019. I think it was the original Orion program, and it was the early… It was like Obama had just come in and There was a renewed sense of optimism about human space flight, and that all fizzled out, unfortunately.
[01:09:05.23] – Alastair Reynolds
But at that point, it felt like a really exciting time where we were going to recapitulate the achievement. The the successes of Apollo. We were going to do it all again, but bigger and better. We were going to be on the Moon by 2019, and then obviously establish some more permanent human presence on the Moon And then inevitable talk about going to Mars, and it all seemed to be happening and beginning again. And I was really excited because I’d had this dangled in front of me my whole life, the idea of a return to the moon. And it never seemed to be happening, but all of a And all of a sudden it was on the cards again. And there were mockups to the spacecraft you could see and things like that. And you go, Yeah, it’s going to happen. We’re going to go out into the solar system. And I was really excited about this. I thought, I want to write a science fiction book that takes it captured the enthusiasm and optimism and positivity I felt about that as a human challenge. I had this crazy thing that it was going to be a logarithmic timeline.
[01:10:16.12] – Alastair Reynolds
So the first book was going to be the next 100 years, and then it was going to be the next 1,000 years, and then it was going to be the next 10,000 years, and we’d go out into the universe and the galaxy and all that. And it was going to be a multi-generational family saga. And as soon as I sat down to write it, I thought, I can’t do it. If you’re going to tell a multi-generational family saga over a 1,000 years, you’re dealing with the great, great, great, great, great grandchildren, whoever was in the first book. And I thought, I just didn’t have the chops as writer to pull that off. So I compressed the whole thing. Okay, let’s make it over 300 years, not 10,000. And then I started thinking about the characters and where they were in society and what we’d achieved in society. And I wanted part of the book to be about going to the moon and Mars and human settlement in the solar system and all the possibilities of that. But I also wanted to counterpoint it by saying that doesn’t mean we’ve abandoned Earth, so there’s still a sense of custodian leadership and stewardship about Earth.
[01:11:16.02] – Alastair Reynolds
I thought, I’ll make one of the characters, he’s not really interested in all that stuff. He’s more focused on the inner space of the animal mind. My wife had worked on… She’d worked at an elephant rehabilitation Center. So she came back from that with stories about elephants, and it interested me. And I thought, well, I’ve watched a few TV programs about elephants with her. I’ve read a few books. So I’ve got the basic rudimentary understanding that I can just about pull this off. So that was where that stuff came from. But it was also… The elephants then became a motif that played through the other books, and they obviously I took them in different directions and maybe directions I hadn’t had in mind when I first started the first book. For me, I enjoyed playing with that theme, and it was a little bit polarizing. Some readers said, The Elephant books, glad you’re not writing those anymore. I’m glad you finished with that stuff. But I was like, Well, come on. The elephants were only a small… They were just a subplot. They weren’t the main part of the book. It’s not like you had to suffer thousands of pages of elephants, but I enjoyed writing them.
[01:12:27.09] – Alastair Reynolds
It just came out of that positive state of mind I was in.
[01:12:32.18] – Brandon
Yeah, I really enjoyed that story. And for anyone watching, I would recommend checking it out.
[01:12:41.01] – Alastair Reynolds
Thank you. The books So nothing ever goes to plan. And I had this idea for a trilogy, and I’d sold it to my editor, and it was going to be this big thing. And then my editor left. So the first book was slightly off And then the second book had a different editor, and then the third book had a different editor. So it would have been maybe a different thing if there had been continuity in the production process and the editorial process across all three books, but they were a struggle for me because every step, there was a big reset where I was learning to work with the new editor, and they had no real emotional involvement in the preceding book because they hadn’t edited it. So it helps when you have a long, stable relationship with an editor because they get to know your ideas, they know your working methods, they know how you think and how you plan. And we didn’t have that across those three books. So that’s why it was certainly a more tortuous process than I thought it would be at the time I started writing them. And I was bloody glad to be done with it as well, actually.
[01:13:50.05] – Alastair Reynolds
And I said, as much as I’ve enjoyed some aspects of writing that trilogy, I’m never going to do another trilogy again. And then I almost immediately started writing another trilogy. But that’s it. No more trilogies.
[01:14:07.24] – John Knych
I hear you. I was muted. A toilet is being installed in my house now. That’s why I’m muted. That’s actually the last question I want to ask you, Al, that circles back to the beginning of the conversation and the introduction in that I found it very interesting that you prefer revising and polishing to actual writing, and that contradicts other authors I’ve had for this channel. For example, like Adrian Tchaikovsky says, he hates revising. He just likes to world build and write. A lot of fantasy sci-fi authors, that tends to be the case. Can you talk with us about this? Because also people who will watch this later, there are a lot of writers and creators who I think will be interested in this. You’re also prolific, you publish a lot. Do you just pump out what you think is just garbage and then spend the majority of the time fine-tuning it? Could you just talk to us about your revision process?
[01:15:11.09] – Alastair Reynolds
Nothing I write is garbage. How can you possibly say that? No, I think it comes down to whether you’re… What do they say? Like a plotter or a panzer, this thing that some writers will spend six months mapping out the architecture of a novel before they write one I’ve learned. I’m a much more restless writer, and I need to be writing stuff, or I feel a deep sense of… I don’t feel any self-worth as an individual unless I’m writing. That’s my job. And for better or worse, if I can write a thousand words or a three thousand words a day, I can point to it and say, Well, at least I’ve done something today. So I like to be in that creative flow where I’m generating prose, but I’m not When I start writing a book, it is really just a stream of garbage, and I get to the end, and I think of it as… And it’s a metaphor I’ve used before, so I apologize to anyone who’s heard this before, but it’s like you’ve got to get across a chasm, and you need to get a bridge across the chasm. You can’t just have a bridge.
[01:16:18.16] – Alastair Reynolds
You’ve got to start with… You throw a flimsy rope, and there’s someone on the other side that catches the rope. And once you’ve got that flimsy rope across, you can then pull a more sturdy rope across, and then you can start You’re building a rope bridge, and then you build another bridge. But you don’t get anywhere until you’ve got that first flimsy rope across the chasm. And that’s how I see a first draft. It’s just get something down and get to the end. And there will be bits of that first draft that are not bad, but where it’s lacking from my point of view is in that, I don’t know what you call it, but the meta level where you You have cross-connections between aspects of the story. You have foreshadowing, the payoff of things that maybe aren’t obvious early on. I can’t plan any of that stuff. All I can do is write and let those intertextual connections arise. It’s almost like a subconscious process, but I need to have a draft complete And then I can go back and begin to do the stuff that I find fun, which is when you set up that long distance connections between parts of the story, the payoff and foreshadowing and all that.
[01:17:46.12] – Alastair Reynolds
And that’s where the real joy lies for me in writing is when you find those connections. Often it’s like your subconscious, you’ll get to a point in the story and it’s like, now I really need I really need to have set something up in chapter three that I can… And you think, ‘Oh, hang on. I did do that thing in chapter three. I don’t know why I did it, but I did it. And now I can use that. ‘Oh, wow. It’s almost like I knew I was going to have to do that later on. And that for me is the joy of writing. That’s where it is. It’s not in the first draft, and it’s not in the editing, the publication. It’s in those creative breakthroughs that you get, as I say, sometimes at 2: 00 in the morning on a cold, wet night, where you just suddenly realize that You’ve given yourself… You’ve set something up in the story, and you didn’t even realize you’d set it up, and now you can make a magnificent payoff. But that’s where I get all the pleasure, and it’s all in that creative process of rewriting and tightening.
[01:18:53.15] – Alastair Reynolds
Everyone’s going to be different, but for me, that’s where I get my worth as a writer comes at that point. I hate everything after that. I hate editing. I hate being edited.
[01:19:08.13] – John Knych
That makes sense because your books have this sense of being honed and crafted, but are also spontaneous and organic. I think you can often tell with a writer when every single thing is planned out beforehand, it just feels too formulaic, almost.
[01:19:27.18] – Alastair Reynolds
I have I enjoyed doing that, and I’ve written a couple of books where they were structured and plotted in quite a detailed way in advance, but it took some of the joy out of it for me. I didn’t enjoy it. On my level, you take That way the anxiety because you know you’ve got a story mapped out. You don’t have to worry about how the hell am I going to resolve this thing. But I also found that, actually, I like the fear. I enjoy it. And I was watching an interview with Colson Whitehead, who’s one of my favorite contemporary writers, and he was saying, he talked about the fear. When you’re writing a novel, there’s that fear at the back of your mind. Am I actually going to pull this off? And I thought it was reassuring to hear someone else talk about it, because it does get you. It’s two in the morning, you wake up in a cold sweat thinking, How the hell am I going to make this function, this story? But I wouldn’t want it any other way. I couldn’t work as an architect who plans a story months and months in advance.
[01:20:38.21] – Alastair Reynolds
And it’s no reflection on the quality. I mean, some of the best writers work that way. Peter Hamilton, who’s a friend of mine, He’s much more of a spend a year world building and planning and plotting before he actually writes a page. But I just want to get going, just dive into the thing.
[01:20:55.11] – John Knych
Any other sci-fi authors you want to shout out living who you think we should have on this channel?
[01:21:03.04] – Alastair Reynolds
Well, from this side of the pond, my oldest colleague in science fiction is Paul McCauley, who’s a wonderful writer and a very varied writer. And like me, he came up through the magazine markets. He was living in America, actually, at the time when he first started publishing science fiction. And he had an American publisher. But we met because I was He was a lecturer in St Andrews University while I was doing my PhD, and we were both published in Interzone. So the editor said, Do you realize you live next in the same little town as this Reynalds guy? So we met, and I learned a lot about the side aspects of publishing from Paul, and he’s a very good writer. What’s his name?
[01:21:51.12] – John Knych
Can you say it again, Paul?
[01:21:52.24] – Speaker 1
Paul McCauley. M-c-a-u-l-e-y. Yeah, very good writer. And His background is… He’s like a plant biologist, but he’s got a wide interest in cosmology and artificial intelligence and things like that play into his writing. And he writes He writes across a lot of different disciplines within science fiction. He does the far future stuff. Are you a fan of Gene Wolfe by any chance?
[01:22:21.24] – John Knych
I’ve read him a little bit.
[01:22:23.18] – Alastair Reynolds
Yeah. I think Paul and I are both big Jean Wolf fans, and there’s that Working in that mode. And I guess then the antecedence to Jean Wolf, like Jack Vance, and then maybe going all the way back to William Hope Hodgston, that strand is something that we both relate to a lot as writers. Stephen Baxter has been a very good friend of mine almost since I first ventured into science fiction. He collaborated with Arthur C. Clarke when Clarke was alive, he collaborated with Terry Thatcher. And then Steve and I did a collaborative novel, The Medusa Chronicles, which is we took a short story by Arthur C. Clarke and then wrote a novel-length sequel to it with the permission of the Clarke estate. So we enjoyed doing that. And Steve lives the other side of the country for me, so we don’t see each other very often, but we communicate a lot. And then obviously, Peter Hamilton is a very good friend of mine. We used to live quite near, so we maybe meet up, do a bit of hill walking once or twice a year, but he’s the other side of the country again now, so we don’t see each other quite as often as we used to, but still a very good writer, good friend.
[01:23:38.09] – John Knych
Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Al. Do you have anything else, Brandon, you want to add?
[01:23:45.04] – Brandon
Thank you. Yeah, this has been great. I guess what’s in the future for you? I know you mentioned a novel earlier. Do you have an estimated date Is it possible for that to come out?
[01:24:01.23] – Alastair Reynolds
Yeah. So the book I wrote last year, that should come out this summer. It’s called Halcyon Years, and it’s a standalone, and it’s a 1940s Raymond Chandler murder mystery set aboard a Generation starship. So it’s in my head, it’s like if you took Greater Los Angeles of the big sleep and rolled it into a tube and sent it into space, then you just told a murder mystery on that ship. That’s what it’s all about. So it’s a bit of a conscious homage to that, but also a science fiction story. It’s quite short and awful as well. It’s just over 100,000 words. So I wrote your version, which is… Jack showed the French cover of it. That was one of my shorter novels at the time. And that, for me, is the mode I want to operate in, is relatively short novels that are stand-alone and self contained. So that’s been off my desk for nearly a year, apart from edits. But what I’m working on now is, over the last 20 years, more than that now, I wrote four short stories with one protagonist called Merlin, and they’re far future space opera, not connected to anything else, but they are linked stories.
[01:25:24.10] – Alastair Reynolds
And he travels the universe looking for something, and along the he gets into mishaps and adventures. And he’s a bit of a braggadocio. He’s full of himself, but he’s got some redeeming qualities as well. So I’ve written these Merlin stories, and for at least a decade, probably more, we’ve been talking about maybe publishing them as one book. So the next thing is the Merlin Chronicles. But it’s not just four short stories It’s like the whole thing remixed into a novel with probably about 30,000 words of additional material. So that’s what I’m working on now, and that’s coming near the end now. And once that’s off my desk, I’ll have a reset and talk with my agent and my editor about what they want from me next and remind myself when the deadline for that is. But basically, I’m always working on something, and I like to be busy. And if I’m not working on a novel, then I’ll try and be working on a short story or something. I’m not very good at many things or anything, really, apart from I can just about write science fiction, so I might as well write as much of it as I can.
[01:26:47.12] – Alastair Reynolds
That’s my philosophical outlook on life. So I just generate as much stuff while you still can write a lot. Don’t taper off. So I’m still enjoying what I’m doing, and I still got, hopefully, a for more things and different modes to work in. I’m hoping not to slow down for a bit.
[01:27:08.08] – John Knych
Thank you.
[01:27:08.24] – Brandon
I’ll be looking out for those and I’ll be first in the pre-order line.
[01:27:14.22] – Speaker 1
Oh, thank you. I really appreciate it.
[01:27:17.11] – John Knych
We really appreciate this. I’ll share it with the group. I’ll send you an email with the video later as well. But this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much.
[01:27:28.16] – Alastair Reynolds
Well, thank you. My pleasure, too. Thank you.
[01:27:30.20] – Brandon
Thank you.
[01:27:31.21] – Alastair Reynolds
Have a good day. Cheers.
[01:27:33.17] – john Knych
Thank you.
Alastair Reynolds Introduction:
Born in Barry, South Wales, Alastair Reynolds started writing Scifi in his teens, received a PHD in astronomy from University of St. Andrews in Scotland, then started working for the European Space Agency as an astrophyicist in 1991.
His first publication was in Interzone in 1990, Ninivak Snowflakes. And while he thought he had cracked into the industry with a small, as he called, rash of short story sales in the early 90s, it wasn’t until 1997 that he returned to a book-in-progress to polish it for submission – Revelation Space. This book then took two years to sell, before it was published in 2000, 25 years ago.
Since then he has published 20 novels, over 70 pieces of shorter fiction, he famously received a 10 book, 1 million pound 10 year publishing deal back in 2008. He’s won Locus, Hugo, and BFSA awards. Revelation Space is part of a universe that Reynolds says isn’t really a series but rather a mosaic. With interweaving settings and characters.
Two of his short stories were adapted for Netflix animated episodes, Zima Blue and Beyond the Aquila Rift. I’m hoping more of his work will be made into film, maybe we can talk about that later.
He enjoys rewriting more than the act of first putting words down. Another topic I’m curious about. He’s a keen runner, having run the Cardiff half-marathon last year for an Alzehimer’s charity, and he is a guitar enthuastist, last year taking weekly lessons.
But last thing I’ll say before my question is that I discovered Alastair Reynolds through House of Suns, which I thoroughly enjoyed, it’s epic, the ending is gut-punch, but when I read Revelation Space was I just blown away. The scope and language are, I believe just unprecedented, I don’t even like calling it Scifi, but rather, just high and profound literature, that I’m practically certain will stand the test of time.
