| Alastair Reynolds | Contributor: Amfo | Posted: 14/02/07 | 22:52 |
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page 2 of 6 I have what I think is a good track record in short fiction, and I've kept up short story writing. Many of the pieces in the collection appeared in British SF magazines, but it was hard for people to find old copies of Interzone from 15 years ago, so readers were asking for a collection.
I've made attempts to do this in the past, but lots of the stuff doesn't have an online component and we would have needed to scan old magazines or type out stories again and it was just too much work at the time, when the novels were the focus and schedules were tight. But I've always valued collections and I'm certainly glad to have one. Was the publisher just as enthusiastic?
They were receptive to the idea. There is a perception out there that collections don't sell well. Galactic North was released in October 2006 so I guess we'll see.
Any indications of how well it has been received so far?"
Well it's always hard to tell. I get sales figures from the publisher but they're always so complicated and difficult to read properly. I usually cool off on a book once it's finished and has been published, and it takes me a long time to feel good about it again.
Century Rain for instance, it's been two or three years since I wrote it and I'm just now starting to like it again. At this point Reynolds and I move on to discuss Pushing Ice. If you've already read our review, you'll know we found it just a little bit too similar to Arthur C Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama. Fortunately for Reynolds, visitors to the site leapt to his defence, saying he was evoking the spirit of old-skool SF and updating it for the new millennium. I put this idea to him. Actually I don't have strategies like that! The hook for me with this novel was to explore both the Fermi paradox but also have a whole bunch of aliens around that were at about the same technological level as the humans.
But if the Fermi paradox was to hold true, then there couldn't be all these cultures at the same level without some kind of intervention. The races should all have risen and fallen at different epochs. So I had to get them all together at the end of time, as it were. But not in a restaurant...
Er, no. Obviously a few people have brought up the Rendezvous with Rama similarities, but the one I thought I was really going to get stung for was David Brin and Gregory Benford's Heart of the Comet. You know, where they go out and get stuck on Halley's Comet and all these different human cultures rise up and things.
The truth is, I haven't read Rendezvous with Rama since I was about 12 years old, and I never got around to reading any of the sequels. |
