Daleks scared the hell out of me, to the point where I wouldn’t go round to another boy’s house because he had Dalek wallpaper in his bedroom. Alastair Reynolds Read Quote
I had an artistic streak and was good at painting and drawing and also very good at English, but I did want to be a scientist. The education system means you have to choose physics or Shakespeare. It can’t be both. Alastair Reynolds Read Quote
I’m just happy to have some American readers – enough that it’s a viable proposition for my books to appear there. Alastair Reynolds Read Quote
We’ve had science fiction novels where China is dominant; we’ve had novels where India is dominant, and I suppose it’s all about getting away from that cliched old tired idea that the future belongs to the West. Alastair Reynolds Read Quote
I think I set myself on a course to become a scientist around about the time that Carl Sagan’s ‘Cosmos’ series was on television, and there really was no going back for me at that point, and then I went on to study space science and then get my Ph.D., then go aboard and work in the European Space Agency. Alastair Reynolds Read Quote
I’m always a little bit cautious around invented terminology because so much science fiction is off-putting to the uninitiated. You open up the first page, and it’s full of all these made-up words. Alastair Reynolds Read Quote
One of the big breakthroughs I had as a writer was when I stopped agonising over every word. Alastair Reynolds Read Quote
When you’re writing stuff that’s already clotted with neologisms and trying to get across fairly abstruse concepts, you’re already putting a heavy burden on the reader. Alastair Reynolds Read Quote
I couldn’t ever write a straight crime novel: there’d be an intrusion of weirdness at some point. Alastair Reynolds Read Quote
When I look back at many of the moments of wonder, awe, or terror that I’ve got from science fiction, it’s often been because I’ve been put in the head of one of the characters. Alastair Reynolds Read Quote
