Alastair Reynolds Quotes Quotes

Like everyone else, I read newspapers and 'New Scientist' and try to put my finger on the trends which we can just see emerging now that are accelerating and might take off.
Most of the time, when I get an idea that hinges on some science 'thing,' it will have been because of something I read or encountered months or years earlier rather than in the last few days.
My early memories of 'Who' are clouded by time and confused by repeats and reissues. I have no direct recollection of the first two Doctors and none at all of the first season of the Pertwee era. By the last two seasons of the Third Doctor, I was properly hooked.
My mother was a part of a reading group, but they would never come near science fiction because they think it's not for them.
No idea should be discarded completely, but - as one might imagine - it does take a degree of ingenuity to find a new spin on something as hackneyed as the 'Adam and Eve' story. But if you think you've got the chops for it, there's no reason not to try.
One of the big breakthroughs I had as a writer was when I stopped agonising over every word.
One of the dangers of science fiction, particularly bad science fiction, is that you have these scenes where the characters turn to a blackboard and start explaining how this faster-than-light drive works, or something like that. We never really have those conversations in real life. That's not part of the way we interact as human beings.
Science fiction can be very relevant, could be good literature.
Science fiction writers aren't short of ideas. You can read a book, and it sets off a chain of thought processes, so it becomes a response to other people's books.
Sitting here at the beginning of the 21st century, we're only 200 years into the industrial revolution. We don't have an enormous dataset to draw on, so whatever shaped curve we're on, we're only at the beginning of it.
Speaking for myself, I really struggle to pinpoint whether I became a scientist because I like science fiction, or did I gravitate to science fiction because I identified strongly with scientists.
The first time I read a crime novel - I think it may have been an Elmore Leonard book - it took some time for me to realise how the genre worked. There were about 20 characters on the first page, and I wasn't used to this. I started to enjoy it when I saw that was how crime books worked.
The idea of a computer winning the Nobel Prize for physics is not too unlikely, citing a computer as joint recipient. It's obviously not a huge leap to think of something similar happening in fiction.
The one thing that really terrifies me is we're going to get a signal from space that clears it all up: 'OK, this is how the universe works, guys.'
There are similarities between historical novels and science fiction. Being thrown into the Napoleonic Wars is just as much of a different world as space.
There is enough material in the Kuiper Belt to build anything out there. We could gobble up all the little asteroids, filtering out all the volatile materials, leaving us with bits of rock and using that to make some incredible structures.
There is so little SF drawn from modern scientific thinking, in any discipline, that I'm much more cheered by the successes than the failures, most of which are forgivable.
To be remembered at all is an achievement of sorts.
We live in a science fictional world with things like cloning and face transplants, and things seem to be getting stranger and stranger.
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.
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Alastair Reynolds
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