| Alastair Reynolds | Contributor: Amfo | Posted: 14/02/07 | 22:52 |
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page 3 of 6 I've noticed in your work that people with computers in their heads tend to get a bit of a raw deal, such as the Conjoiners in the Galactic North sequence, and of course poor Crabtree in Pushing Ice...
Yes, poor Crabtree. Actually there was a lot more to the Crabtree subplot but I cut it all out in later drafts. I really tend to go over my work with a scalpel and cut out everything that's not absolutely necessary, but it would have been nice to see a bit more of him.
I don't really have an agenda though, I just adhere to that old wisdom: it's more interesting to write about things that go wrong. So that's where I'm coming from with both Crabtree and the nanotech plague in the Galactic North sequence. Do I think nanotech is actually going to take over the world? No, I don't think so. Obviously it's possible to split your work into "Revelation Space stuff" and "not Revelation Space stuff", and Pushing Ice falls into the latter group. Is it a one-off, or are we likely to hear more from the Lindblad Ring, the Fountainheads and the Musk Dogs?
I would like to go back to it one day maybe. I think if there is another book it will be a high-tech, future sort of story and will focus very much on the alien cultures in the Spican construction.
It's interesting actually because as you know Pushing Ice is set in this enormous construct, not on a planet, and the book I've just finished is set on orbital constructs and such, so maybe it would be good to write something on a world for a change. I was a bit disappointed that the Musk Dogs didn't turn out to actually be the good guys and the Fountainheads the bad guys, just to keep the reader guessing, that is, the apparently evil aliens turning out to be good. Were you ever tempted to make that switcheroo, or was it too late in the book by that stage?
Actually I never set out to make either culture explicitly good or evil. I think the Musk Dogs are just a bit more self-serving, but again this is something I'd like to explore in the future.
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