In some respects, big ideas can be a bit too big for a short story – especially if you’ve only got a couple of thousand words to play with, and you need room for other stuff, like character, description. Alastair Reynolds Read Quote
Don’t keep rewriting and polishing something if it isn’t setting the world on fire: start something new instead and consider the earlier story a learning experience. Alastair Reynolds Read Quote
It’s not healthy to obsess over every data point, every review or reader comment. I think the first few times you see someone writing about you, you have this massive emotional response to it. But after a while, it all just fades into the background noise. Alastair Reynolds Read Quote
In the ‘Revelation Space’ books, the spaceships are a bit old and rusty, and things go wrong, and they don’t work quite how they’re meant to. And people asked why I did it this way, and groping around for an explanation, I said that I grew up in Barry, this post-industrial sea town full of rusting infrastructure. Alastair Reynolds Read Quote
Speaking for myself, I really struggle to pinpoint whether I became a scientist because I like science fiction, or did I gravitate to science fiction because I identified strongly with scientists. Alastair Reynolds Read Quote
I’ve been enthralled by deep vistas of space and time ever since watching George Pal’s film of ‘The Time Machine,’ while an early encounter with Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘The City And The Stars’ cemented my love for books with a scope spanning millions of years. Alastair Reynolds Read Quote
I had – and continued to have – great fun exploring the Revelation Space universe, but it was always clear to me that I wanted to write other kinds of books, even within what might be termed the fairly narrow overlapping genre categories of hard SF and space opera. Alastair Reynolds Read Quote
