Alastair Reynolds

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Alastair Reynolds is a Welsh science fiction author. He specialises in rather dark hard science fiction and space opera. Some consider him to be part of the New Weird literary movement.

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1 Biography
2 Works (spoiler-free)
3 Bibliography
4 External links

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Biography

Reynolds was born in 1966 in Barry, South Wales. He spent his early years in Cornwall, moved back to Wales and on to university in Newcastle doing Physics and Astronomy. Then it was on to a PhD at St Andrews, Scotland. In 1991, he moved to Noordwijk, in the Netherlands, where he met his wife Josette and where he worked for the European Space Research and Technology Centre, part of the European Space Agency, until 2004, when he left to pursue writing full time.

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Works (spoiler-free)

Reynolds had his first science fiction short story published in 1990. Since then he has published over twenty shorter works and six novels (as of 2006). His works are hard science fiction and reflect his professional expertise with physics and astronomy, including by extrapolating future technologies in terms that are consistent with current science. His first four novels and several of his previous short stories take place within one consistent future world, usually now called the Revelation Space world after the first novel published in it, although it was originally developed in short stories for several years before the first novel. However, the works set within this future timeline rarely have the same protagonists twice. Often the protagonists from one work belong to a group that is regarded with suspicion or enmity by the protagonists of another work. While a great deal of science fiction reflects either very optimistic or dystopian visions of the human future, Reynolds's future worlds are notable in that human societies have not departed to either positive or negative extremes, but instead are similar to those of today in terms of moral ambiguity and a mixture of cruelty and decency, corruption and opportunity, despite their technology being dramatically advanced.

The Revelation Space storyline includes stories set over a span of several centuries, spanning approximately 2050 to 2700. Among the basic rules of this world are that faster-than-light travel is impossible, but interstellar travel may be done using propulsion systems that can exert an arbitrarily high force without requiring propellant mass; and that extraterrestrial sentience exists but is elusive. Century Rain takes place in a future world independent of the Revelation Space world and has different rules, such as that faster-than-light travel is possible. Century Rain also departs substantially from Reynolds's previous works in having a main protagonist who is much closer to the perspective of our real world and who serves as a proxy for the reader in confronting the unfamiliarity of the advanced sci-fi aspects, whereas Reynolds's previous protagonists started out fully absorbed in the exoticisms of the future world. Pushing Ice is also a standalone story.

See also Transhumanism in fiction, which contains plot spoilers for Reynolds's œuvre.

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