| Alastair Reynolds | Contributor: Amfo | Posted: 14/02/07 | 22:52 |
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page 4 of 6 Pushing Ice has at its heart a discussion of the Fermi Paradox - if the universe is so good at generating intelligent life, why aren't we already being visited by aliens? There are various takes on this, but Reynolds uses the theory that says cultures evolve so far apart, one has been extinct for millions of years before the next one arises. Pushing Ice deals with this by collecting aliens together at the "end of time", where they can interact. I asked Reynolds why he and so many other writers were working with the Fermi Paradox now, as opposed to just filling the universe with aliens, Star Trek style. Well of course I can't speak for other writers, but for me it's just a really interesting principle to think about. I do know a bunch of us read Barrow, Tipler and Wheeler's The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, I know Stephen Baxter read it, and Paul McAuley read it too.
It's a great book, and as an SF writer it gave me pause, it lead me to look at a lot of unexplained assumptions in my work. I thought it made for an interesting new way of looking at the universe, at a human only universe. Which is interesting because this is of course what Asimov was famous for. The whole idea of the absence of aliens in real life is so huge, you can't really avoid it if you think about these ideas seriously for any length of time. That said I am currently a bit burned out on the Fermi Paradox at the moment, I've sort of moved on from it. I think it's something I still want to write about and think about, but just not right away. If we were forced to label Reynold's work with a cute category, we'd probably hazard that his books are often full of "hard ideas". Hard both in the sense of having real-world scientific backing, and also just being really difficult to wrap your head around. So I asked him how confident he was that his readers would "get" his work. I've always been pretty confident in my readers, yes.
I think a case in point is in Pushing Ice which is set in the near future, but the hero gets a message from her far future, which because they're travelling at light speed, is actually her distant past, all at the same time. How confident are you that people won't just read that and break down and cry?
You know what? For me the challenge has always been to write "up" to my readers. I know there are a lot of readers who are much smarter than me, and if there are a few who miss some ideas, well there's not much I can do about it.
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