| Alastair Reynolds | Contributor: Amfo | Posted: 14/02/07 | 22:52 |
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page 5 of 6 Occasionally it's irritating, because some early reviews of Pushing Ice claimed there was unscientific faster-than-light travel in the book, which is obviously a misreading, but I don't let it worry me too much.
I've certainly never held back on an idea or rejected an idea for being too complicated. And anyway, I was recently reading Greg Egan's latest novel and it was all about this radical new idea of reality and how everything was made up of quantum graphs and Egan explored this throughout a whole book. And for me the penny never really dropped, I never really got it, but that didn't really lessen my enjoyment of the book. As we've already mentioned, Reynolds' work is broken into books and stories dealing with the Galactic North sequence (as we're going to go ahead and call it now), and stand-alone stories. So it's clear he needs to take a break from his magnum opus from time to time. I asked him to elaborate on how the flow of ideas works for him. After Absolution Gap I didn't have a lot of enthusiasm for the Galactic North sequence and I didn't really want to spend a lot more time with it. But then I went away from it for a while, then came back to write a few short stories and that opened up new ideas, new things to explore.
I always knew it wouldn't continue forever, and I certainly don't want to be doing it in fifty years, but there's probably a book or two more in it. I think when you write hard SF there's a danger in staying with the one universe for too long. I mean, look at what happened to Asimov. He wrote Foundation in the forties, and everything in it is all about the ideas of that time, psychohistory, the whole bit. Then when he came back to the series in the eighties, he had to somehow explain why his universe was so out of date, why there were no black holes, and so forth. In my case, the Galactic North sequence deals with stars in our local galactic area, just a few hundred light years away, and when I wrote the first book there had been no extra-solar planets discovered. Now there's more than 200, so there are data in real life that are already divergent from data in the earlier books. But that's going to happen to all of us who use real science in our work, so I'm not too worried about it. Another distinctive element of a Reynolds book is that while the core concepts might be hard SF, there's always a strong undercurrent of horror. Horrific things tend to happen to the characters, there's often something crawling around in the air vents, and the sense of dread is often very pronounced. I asked Reynolds if this was something he tried to evoke deliberately. |
