Saturn V
Now Playing: Inspiral Carpets

Here's the fruit of today's progress: most of the S1C stage completed, together with the five F-1 engines. For contrast (below)  is the real thing: this is the horizontal Saturn V at Banana Creek, Kennedy Space Center, captured in October.

The real things aren't anywhere near as shiny (or red on the inside) as Revell's paint guidelines would have you think, but I'd imagine that the engines shown here have tarnished a bit over the years. There's another F-1 at one of the viewing stands which I wish I'd photographed.

It's amazing to think that these engines were originally going to power an even bigger moon rocket, the Nova, which would have used eight in the first stage. The Nova would create so much sound and vibration that it was generally assumed that the only safe place to launch it would be from a platform floating out at sea.

 

 

 

 

 

Rocket in my pocket
Now Playing: Little Feat

And now for something completely different ... I thought it would be a bit of a laugh if, instead of the usual rambling, sporadic blather, I tried to do something truly constructive and useful with this blog. And what could be more constructive - or appropriate in 2009 - than to build this 1/96th scale plastic model kit of a Saturn V rocket so that I can have something really impressive sitting on my desk? It may all end in tears, but I'm going to shoot for assembling it by the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, on July 20th.

Watch this space (rocket)...

 

It's blitz
Now Playing: Yeah, yeah, yeahs

News of the ten book contract is out there now, so many thanks for the congratulations and good wishes I've received, and the many kind things I've seen here and there on the internet. As some have noted, while it's good for me - no bones about that - it also says something encouraging about the state of the genre. Far from dying on its feet (I've been reading obituaries for SF for about as long as I've been reading them about rock music) it's not doing at all badly, and may even be in the ascendant.

The contract doesn't change much as far as my writing habits are concerned. I've been hitting about a book a year since I started with Orion in 1999 - in fact we've done nine novels and three collections in ten years, or will have by the time the year's out - and all that's really required of me is to keep on the same level of productivity for another ten. It's not to be taken lightly, but at the same it's not too daunting. I've always wanted to be a prolific writer, and so a book a year feels about right to me. The idea of spending two or three years of my life on a single work fills me with existential dread, although that's purely a reflection on my own approach to the craft, which is very much a case of diving in and immersing myself in a book at a level which would almost certainly drive me insane if it lasted longer than six or nine months. To put it in rock terms, I'd rather be Neil Young than one of those artists who only releases work every three years or so. At that same time, I'm aware of the hazards of over-production: there are writers whose work I followed assiduously, until they gradually outstripped my capability to keep up. In many cases I simply stopped them reading them entirely. Obviously I'll be hoping that isn't the case with all my readers, but at the same time I'm mindful of the possibility. Above all else, I'll be working hard to improve my books and stretch my range, while at the same time hopefully delivering the kind of big SF kicks that I'm perhaps best known for. Sitting here now, I can honestly say that the last thing I feel is complacent or smug. Excited and apprehensive in equal measure is more like it - and acutely aware that I've been fortunate on many levels. For all its flaws, my first novel found a readership, and while it wasn't everyone's cup of tea - hell, I'm not even sure it would have been mine - REVELATION SPACE did get me off to a good start. I'm in no doubt that timing and marketing played a massive role in that, but what mattered was that it provided a foundation for the subsequent books. I'm also truly grateful that both my publisher and my readers (or enough of them, anyway) were happy to see me strike off into different fictional universes, be it the faux-1959 of CENTURY RAIN or the near-future spacefaring solar system of PUSHING ICE. I love doing the Revelation Space stories, but - gratifyingly - I've never felt like I was a prisoner of them. Maybe that's why I still like doing them.

I've been lucky in many other ways. I've worked with a supportive and understanding editor - the excellent Jo Fletcher - for all my novels to date, and my agent Robert Kirby has been a genuine star. But I've also had the benefit of a great family, a wonderful and supportive wife, and friends who've been there when I needed them. I had a great job at ESA which involved working with some truly smart people (people who made me realise that I'm actually a bit of a thicko on many levels), and for most of the last fifteen years I've had the financial security to be able to treat writing as a glorified hobby - something I'll do so long as it's fun/challenging/whatever. That's still pretty much my attitude: it almost never feels like a day job. I've also had the benefit in my adult years of stamina and good health - something you can never take for granted. Anyone with a passing knowledge of the current SF and fantasy scene will know of writers who are dealing with issues of personal health that would make almost all the usual writerly grievances - certainly any that I ever have to deal with - look very trivial indeed. So I'm not only lucky, but mindful that there are writers (and readers, for that matter) out there who'd love the certainty of ten years of life, let alone ten years of income. So yes, a very happy camper here.

That's about it for now, I think. Time to mention, if you aren't already aware of it, that there's a new story of mine ready to download as an audio podcast from the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/audio/2009/jun/19/alastair-reynolds-scales-short-story

See what you make of it - and don't be too put off by the narrator.

Al R

 

Terminal World art
Now Playing: Chris Moore's superb artwork for TW

Atlantis Redux
Now Playing: Picture of shuttle taken by my wife

Atlantis

I'm in the US right now. Thanks to my pal Louise, I was lucky enough to get ringside seats for the departure of STS-125 on its way to the Hubble Space Telescope.

It was spectacular, everything I hoped it would be.  For added comedy value, your humble correspondent was looking at the *wrong pad* until seconds before ignition (when his wife pointed out that everyone else had their cameras pointed *that way*). Never mind, I did take some truly awesome photographs as the shuttle cleared the pad and began its rotation. You could see everything, even the shock diamonds in the SSME exhausts. The launch was over incredibly quickly, as Atlantis punched its way into low-lying cloud. We didn't get to see the solid rockets separate due to the cloud cover, but that was a small disapointment. It wasn't as loud as I was expecting: about on a par with the loudest afterburner noise you'll hear at an airshow, which is to say impressive but not physically painful. Actually having felt my stomach being churned in knots by a Vulcan bomber, I'd actually rate the shuttle launch as being somewhat quieter. We were at Banana creek, which is about as close as you can get, but there's still a large body of water between you and the pad, which absorbs a lot of the noise. My wife, who saw the launch of an Ariane 5 from Korou, felt that the Ariane was the more visceral experience.

Afterwards, we went to see the new Star Trek film (liked it) at the KSC IMAX. Which is where, rather frustratingly, I appear to have lost my camera, with all the Atantis photos still on the memory card. I've put out feelers and contacted lost and found, but to no avail. In the unlikely event that somewhere out there did find a Panasonic Lumix FZ-50 with a shuttle launch on the card, do get in touch...

Anyway, enough of that - I'm over it now (sob). No, really. Took a biplane ride to cheer myself up, and tonight we're off to see the new Terminator film, which opens today. Usual lacklustre service will be resumed when I return to the UK.

New stuff
Now Playing: Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Once again I must apologise for my slowness in responding to both comments posted here and emails sent to the Dendrocopus account. I'm getting there, but slowly. Thanks for your patience...

In the meantime, I've finished a couple of stories. One of them, "Monkey Suit", is a 5000 word piece set in the Revelation Space universe. More on that when I know for sure that it's going to appear where I think it will. The other story, a somewhat longer piece entitled "Pandora's Box", (not set in the RS universe) will be appearing as an original translated piece in Finnish in the SF magazine Tahtivaeltaja, edited by the inestimable Toni Jerrman.

I've always been fascinated by the texture of translated prose, especially that cool, icy detachment that seems to hover around prose that's been translated from a genuinely foreign language such as Japanese. I used to fantasize about paying someone to translate my stuff into Chinese or Russian, then paying someone else to translate it back again, just so that I could obtain some objective detachment on my prose, im the hope that it would turn out to read like the work of Lem or some other brilliant foreign-language SF writer. I also used to wonder if it was possible to be hypnotized into forgetting your own work, so that you could read it afresh. (I don't need to do that now - I get the same affect just by being 43 and reading stuff I wrote 10 or 20 years ago).

Anyway,  a long time ago - 2004 at the latest - after several pints too many in a Helsinki bar, Toni and I came up with the idea of translating a story of mine into his native language, and then destroying all copies of the original english-language version - including mine. So that's what we're going to do, as soon as Toni has a good translation in hand. So I'll have a story that exists in Finnish, and Finnish only, and if I want to read it again, I'll need to pay someone to translate it back into English. Of course the fact that it's Finnish, not exactly a language everyone can dip into with the greatest of ease, only adds to the fun. Again, more on this when it happens. What wackiness, eh?

For me, I'm just about to dive into the rewrites on TERMINAL WORLD, then I need to do a short story for another anthology project, and then it's onwards and upwards with the new book. Currently reading: Azincourt, Bernard Cornwell. Currently listening: Ali Farka Toure: Savane. And the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, of course, which is very good.

 

 

 

Long-time readers may remember this post (you can find it in the archive, along with comments):

What film is this?

"Has anyone else seen the early 1960s Czech science fiction film Ikarie XB1? (Also released as Voyage to the End of the Universe).

When I was a kid, I saw a film on television that had a considerable effect on me - so much so, that at least part of it fed into Chasm City nearly thirty years later. I remember seeing this film in our house in Cornwall, and we moved out of there around about 1974. It was in black and white, but then so was everything - we only had a black and white telly. (Such is the power of suggestion, though, that when I think back to Pertwee-era Dr Who episodes I only saw in Cornwall, I see them in colour).

The film was set on a spaceship going somewhere. I have the feeling it was foreign (the film, not the spaceship). Now and then there exterior shots of the ship whizzing along at a very high velocity.

At one point a holographic clown or clown-like figure appears to give instruction to/entertain a child (see the clown subplot in Chasm City, which was a conscious nod to this exceedingly vague memory).

My key recollection, and the thing that I found quite disturbing at the time (keep in mind I would have been no older than six or seven) was that one of the crew on the ship was kept in a kind of upright black box with only his head sticking out of the top - it was some kind of suspended animation device, I think - although I remember that the crewman was conscious, or became conscious. Later I recall him breaking out of this box.

That's it. I've looked at online summaries of the plot of Ikarie XB-1, and while none of them specifically contradict these memories, nothing confirms them either. There are also lots of things in those summaries I don't recall.

Did I see this film? Did it mess with my mind and set me on the course to being a miserabilist, left-leaning SF writer?"

 

(End of earlier post)

Thanks to a conversation at Eastercon with possibly the only man on the planet who could have answered my query, Mr Kim Newman, I now know the identity of this film. My recollection of the plot turned out to be right in certain details, very slightly off in others.

Anyone care to take a final guess before the big reveal?

Less busy. But still busy.
Now Playing: Ladyhawke

Well I'm back in circulation. I've just done a massive catch-up on the Dendrocopus email account and will now move onto the comments on this page. Give me a day or two and I might actually get ahead of myself.

TERMINAL WORLD is now a finished book, barring editorial changes (I say that every year, as if the edits were a mere frippery, when in fact they can be weeks of tough work) and I'm about as happy with it as I ever am. Objectivity goes out the window when you've been doing little else than stare at a screen for the better part of three months, let alone the nine months of slog before that, lost in a world of your own creating. That's why it's good to get some distance away from the book for a few weeks, before diving back into it again.

I'm itching to post the cover, but I don't yet have an image of the final draft. Suffice to say it rocks. Really. In the meantime, here's the cover copy:

"Spearpoint, the last human city, is an atmosphere-piercing spire of vast size. Clinging to its skin are the zones, a series of semi-autonomous city-states, each of which enjoys a different - and rigidly enforced - level of technology. Horsetown is pre-industrial; in Neon Heights they have television and electric trains . . . Following an infiltration mission that went tragically wrong, Quillon has been living incognito, working as a pathologist in the district morgue. But when a near-dead angel drops onto his dissecting table, Quillon's world is wrenched apart one more time, for the angel is a winged posthuman from Spearpoint's Celestial Levels - and with the dying body comes bad news. If Quillon is to save his life, he must leave his home and journey into the cold and hostile lands beyond Spearpoint's base, starting an exile that will take him further than he could ever imagine. But there is far more at stake than just Quillon's own survival, for the limiting technologies of the zones are determined not by governments or police, but by the very nature of reality - and reality itself is showing worrying signs of instability . . ."

If you can read that in the voice of that recently deceased Hollywood trailer voiceover guy, that would be good. You know, "In a world where..." kind of thing.

I've touted it as steampunk, but - as I hope is obvious from the above - that's only part of it. It's not exactly hard SF, but - appearances to the contrary - it's not fantasy either. However, it's definitely the book of mine where I've erred on the side of explaining as little as possible.

With that off my desk for the time being, I'm working on a slew of short stories (one of which looked for a while as if it was going to be another Carrie Clay one, before I realised I couldn't make it work in Carrie's universe) and slowly beginning to get into the mindset for the new book, which is likely to be part one of the "big spacefaring" 11K trilogy. So, having taken a holiday from hard SF for at least a book or two, it's time to get back into it big-time... speaking personally, I can't wait.

Music, it's Ladyhawke for me, all the way. Oh yes.

 

Busy
My apologies for the lack of response to various comment posts; I've been busy - very busy - but all are appreciated. I'm now off to London to participate in the BSFA panel discussion on the current shortlist, alongside Jon Courtenay Grimwood and Adam Roberts. Normal service will resume shortly, when I should have some more to say about TERMINAL WORLD.