I’ve never had much interest in spinoffery – the idea of writing in someone else’s universe generally leaves me cold – but ‘Doctor Who’ is different. I’ve grown up with it. It’s been part of my life since I was tiny, watching Jon Pertwee on a grainy black and white television in Cornwall and being terrified out of my mind. Alastair Reynolds Read Quote
I don’t know why, but American sci-fi writers seem to focus on the near-future, which has given us Brits a clear run at the most fascinating. Alastair Reynolds Read Quote
It’s true that my stories seem to deal with the end of the world. I’ve often been called the high priest of gothic miserablism, which is slightly unfair. Alastair Reynolds Read Quote
I’m a wishy-washy ‘Guardian’ reader, but the last thing I want to do is force a political agenda down people’s throats. It’s not central to my work, unlike, say, China Mieville, who’s very politicised. Alastair Reynolds Read Quote
I always like Iain Banks science fiction stuff and William Gibson’s cyberpunk stuff from the 1980s. Alastair Reynolds Read Quote
The first time I read a crime novel – I think it may have been an Elmore Leonard book – it took some time for me to realise how the genre worked. There were about 20 characters on the first page, and I wasn’t used to this. I started to enjoy it when I saw that was how crime books worked. Alastair Reynolds Read Quote
Like everyone else, I read newspapers and ‘New Scientist’ and try to put my finger on the trends which we can just see emerging now that are accelerating and might take off. Alastair Reynolds Read Quote
From apparently superluminal radio sources in deep space, to the neutrinos that were supposed to be arriving ahead of schedule at the Grand Sasso experiment in Italy, every apparent exception to Einstein’s ultimate speed law has turned out to be a phantom. Alastair Reynolds Read Quote
There is enough material in the Kuiper Belt to build anything out there. We could gobble up all the little asteroids, filtering out all the volatile materials, leaving us with bits of rock and using that to make some incredible structures. Alastair Reynolds Read Quote
There is so little SF drawn from modern scientific thinking, in any discipline, that I’m much more cheered by the successes than the failures, most of which are forgivable. Alastair Reynolds Read Quote
