ith a Ph.D. in astronomy and years working as an astrophysicist for the European Space Agency in the Netherlands, Welsh-born Alastair Reynolds was, from the start of his writing career, ideally equipped to become one of the leading authors of the British New Space Opera. His scientific expertise, eloquent writing style, vast imagination and playful taste for the Gothic made his early short stories, published in the 1990s in magazines and anthologies, clear forerunners of something big, and that promise was fulfilled in the four long novels Reynolds set in his signature Inhibitor future history: Revelation Space (2000), Chasm City (2001), Redemption Ark (2002) and Absolution Gap (2003).
Along with a number of short works and the novellas Diamond Dogs (2002) and Turquoise Days (2002), these books paint a dark-yet-adventuresome portrait of scattered human colony worlds centuries from now, wracked by civil wars and nanotech plagues, split along fascinating ideological fault lines and menaced by the Inhibitors, guardians left behind by aliens billions of years ago to suppress any further emergence of spacefaring intelligent life in our galaxy. The battle against the Inhibitors is far-ranging and fragmentary, but its most charismatic leader is the aging soldier Clavain, complex and principled, supported by his deputy, the half-human, half-pig Scorpio, former crime lord and still choleric warrior; their story is told in exhilarating grim detail in Redemption Ark and Absolution Gap.
Reynolds' most recent novel is Century Rain (U.K. 2004; U.S. edition from Ace Books June 2005), a standalone epic concerning the battle between spaceborne human factions for access to an alternate Earth, frozen in time centuries earlier by mysterious aliens and now running according to a strange historical logic of its own. Marrying noir counterfactual intrigue with dazzling space opera, Century Rain is an absorbing book, a bold creative departure for its author.
Science Fiction Weekly interviewed Alastair Reynolds by e-mail in December 2004.
In the last two Inhibitor Universe novels, Redemption Ark and Absolution Gap, Clavain becomes a central figure—in life and in death. You've compared him with the grizzled elder Sean Connery; in reading, I pictured him as Robert E. Lee. How did the character of Clavain evolve in your mind, and what aspects of human nature does he ultimately represent?
Reynolds: Clavain started out as a fairly stock character in a short story, then starred in a sequel to that story, then found himself a major presence in two long novels. That's more than half a million words! Inevitably I found him becoming more real to me as his adventures ensued. By the time I got to Absolution Gap he'd assumed a solidity in my imagination that he hadn't had as a character in a short story, a composite of dozens of real and fictional characters. I think it's clear from his actions throughout the stories and books that he stands for integrity, doing what he believes is right even if that means betraying the trust of those around him. He defects when he sees defecting as being the only morally acceptable course of action. He would never say, "My country right or wrong." In truth, he'd probably never have made it very far into any military hierarchy before being sounded out as a likely turncoat.
In Absolution Gap, Clavain dies, in a quite remarkable manner. Without giving too many details away: How difficult was it for you to kill him off, and in so savage a way?
Reynolds: I was emotionally drained after I'd written the scenes leading up to Clavain's death: not just because it was hard to kill off a character I liked, but because that whole sequence in the iceberg was technically demanding to set up and execute. It took me months to work out how it was all going to happen, and it was a huge relief when I finally got it down. I was working on other parts of the book at the same time, but for a long time there was a huge hole in it where the whole "Clavain death sequence" had to fit. But I'd had firm plans that Clavain would die at the end of Redemption Ark, peacefully, at the water's edge, knowing that he has found [his wife] Galiana.
By the time I'd reached the end of that book I'd already seen off Ilia Volyova, and it seemed that to have Clavain die as well would lessen the impact of either death. So I kept him alive into Absolution Gap, thinking he would die peacefully in that book a few chapters in. But in the end I became interested in the dynamic between Scorpio and Clavain, and the most interesting way to explore that seemed to me to lie in the violent and permanent removal of Clavain from proceedings. It had to be violent, so that Scorpio was given no time to prepare for the difficult burden of leadership. I must admit I was surprised at the reaction to Clavain's death, since it's really only in being cast into the ocean (and thereby assimilated by the alien Pattern Jugglers) that he is finally reunited with his wife and daughter. To me this seemed a fairly positive outcome, given what was on offer. He doesn't really die at all, but simply enters the memory space of Ararat.
Absolution Gap involves an extravagant Gothic invention: a great procession of mechanical Cathedrals, traversing the surface of a moon for cockeyed religious reasons. It's quite a spectacle. What was the inspiration for this? Does it satirize the human religious impulse generally?
Reynolds: I've always wanted to write a story with a giant mobile cathedral in it, is the short answer. It was just one of those ideas that had been floating around in the back of my brain for a few years, waiting for a story to plop into. There was obviously satiric mileage to be had from that image, but at the same time I do genuinely admire huge Gothic cathedrals (although I have a terrible head for heights) and I was rather taken with the idea of one that was capable of locomotion. I'd just read The Spire, by William Golding, as well, so giant cathedrals were much in my mind. When I found a way to fit it all into Absolution Gap, with the additional idea of the circumferential journey around the moon Hela, I was really happy.
One of your Inhibitor novellas, Diamond Dogs, involves a group of humans struggling with a lethally riddlesome alien artifact. Is this symbolic of the Inhibitor universe as a whole—a fatal trap for intelligent life?
Reynolds: It certainly could stand for that, but my impulse for writing that story was a television documentary about the mountain K2. I was mystified as to why certain climbers would return time and again to a mountain that had tested or maimed them in the past. What was the fascination? How much damage would they tolerate before they said enough was enough? K2 is obviously an inanimate object; it's not been put there as a deliberate trap, but it was easy enough to map it into science-fiction terms. But I don't think I'm nearly pessimistic enough to see the entire universe (even the universe of the Inhibitor books) in those terms. I'll add that since writing Diamond Dogs I've continued to be fascinated by mountains and mountain climbers, and I've read dozens of books on the subject. At one point they were about all I was reading.
Redemption Ark and Absolution Gap bring the Inhibitors—ancient, genocidal machines—forth from their hiding places. One of their planet-busting efforts involves what might be described as an astronomically proportioned trumpet. How did you come up with that concept? And are the Inhibitors on some (destructive) level artists?
Reynolds: The Inhibitors were barely mentioned by name in Revelation Space, and my concept of them evolved piecemeal during the writing of Redemption Ark. The Inhibitors are a ruthless machine species dedicated to wiping out intelligence wherever and whenever it threatens to spill out into the galaxy. Unfortunately, they would also need a degree of intelligence to be able to do this efficiently, which leads to all sorts of awkward questions. I toyed with using them as a viewpoint character in Ark, which allowed me to get some of the necessary information across, but perhaps at the expense of retaining that sense of estrangement necessary to convey the truly, chillingly ancient and alien. There's certainly a suggestion that they have what might loosely be termed a sense of humor, and a degree of pride in the notion of a job well done. I suppose artistry wouldn't be too much of a stretch either. As for the trumpet-shaped device ... I can't remember why it ended up trumpet-shaped, but it seemed appropriate for something that was going to sound the doom of a planet.
Early in the series, the Inhibitors seem like harbingers of doomsday; later, while their impact is calamitous, your sketching in of a wider background puts them in a mildly less threatening context. Does this mean that, in future books set in this universe, humankind has a chance? Or will still greater evils overwhelm our species, as the Inhibitor novelette Galactic North (1999) implies?
Reynolds: In my view, this relates to a crucial point about future history. How real do you want it to seem? How much like real history? Real history, it seems to me, doesn't have neat resolutions and conclusions. It stumbles from one uneasy state of affairs to another. You solve one crisis and another one looms. You win the Great War, but the ensuing economic conditions and injustices make another world war almost inevitable. You win the next one, but at the cost of introducing the threat of nuclear war into the world. The Cold War ends, but then you get ethnic conflict and international terrorism, and the old problems begin to seem manageable. Now we're worried about catastrophic environmental change: an issue that wasn't even on the horizon in 1945. By the middle of the century, I'm sure we'll have identified a whole raft of new global anxieties.
I think this is just the way of the world, and science fiction ought to reflect it if it wants to be anything other than escapism. You're right in that greater evils do emerge, as sketched out in Galactic North, but then our capabilities and resilience as a species evolve in step as well. Galactic North is actually quite optimistic, in my book, because it hints that there will still be thousands of years of good times ahead before things reach a crisis point again. And humanity will survive that, as well, even if it means abandoning the old galaxy. So in a way I think the whole thing's quite cheerily upbeat!
Your new novel, Century Rain—not set in the Inhibitor future history—is a fairly audacious melding of space opera with alternate history. Why did you decide on this combination of subgenres?
Reynolds: First off, I wanted to do something different, and alternate history wasn't something I'd tried before. I hadn't even read much of it, in all honesty, even the good stuff. Then I read Pavane, and a little later Chris Priest's The Separation, and I started thinking about it more and more. I'm not for one moment putting Century Rain up against those books, but they were the ones that got my mental gears whirring, and for that I'm eternally grateful. Once I'd hit on the central idea of Century Rain—the idea of the quantum snapshot freezing a slice of the past so that it can be examined and visited by characters from the present—the rest of the book fell into place. The plot as I saw it needed spaceships and wormholes and large alien artifacts, hence the space-operatic elements. Of course Century Rain isn't really an alternate history, but it toys with the form.
In the space-opera sections of Century Rain, the two competing human civilizations are known as the Threshers and the Slashers. Why these names, and what philosophies do they represent?
Reynolds: These are nicknames that have stuck. In Century Rain, the two competing human factions have different views about the degree to which it is healthy to adopt advanced technologies such as nanotech, artificial intelligence and virtual reality. Both cultures went through a phase of enthusiastic adoption of these technologies, and then they suffered a series of catastrophes: malfunctioning nanotech, erased digital records and so on. After recovering from these setbacks, the Threshers adopt a kind of Amish mentality, limiting themselves to only those technologies deemed safe by the arm of government known as the Threshold Committee, which is basically there to make sure they don't make the same mistakes again. The Slashers, on the other hand, have decided that the benefits of these wonderful technologies easily outweigh the risks. I saw the Slashers as technologically gung-ho, with an early-adopter mentality. They're named after the Slashdot web forum, which is a hang-out for gadget freaks and Linux nerds. I took the view that, 260 years in the future, they might look back on that forum the way we might look back on a learned philosophical society from the 18th century. Broadly speaking, the Threshers are pro-analog, the Slashers pro-digital.
I hope it wasn't clear which side I thought was "right." In a way, the two factions represent my own conflicted feelings about the whole stampede toward the digitization of absolutely everything. I own a digital camera and an MP3 player, and I absolutely love them. They're brilliant tools. But at the same I do worry that, as the years go by, less and less of the world is going to be documented on anything other than optical disks, computer hard drives and flash memories, if you can still read them. You don't need to make a conscious effort to archive analog photographs; you just shove 'em in a box. Whereas now you have to burn your pictures onto a CD, and label the CD, and make sure the CD is still readable every few years. In Century Rain there's this idea that there are large gaps in the history of the world between 1977 and 2077, because it's all been lost in the digital crash. I got some of these ideas from reading an essay by Nicholson Baker, in which he talked about the way paper archives are being destroyed all around the world. I was also interested in some of the thinking behind the Long Now Foundation, the organization planning to build a gigantic, easily-repaired metal clock (the "Clock of the Long Now") that will outlive a human dark age.
In the Earth Two passages of Century Rain, you delineate a divergent history of the 20th century, in which Hitler fails to overwhelm France in 1940. Why this scenario? And do you truly think the avoidance of World War II would in some ways have made the position of the world worse than it is now?
Reynolds: I always wanted Wendell Floyd's story to take place in Paris, and I always wanted it to take place in a world that felt like the '30s, even if it might take place two or three decades later. The premise of the quantum snapshot, the creation of a second Earth, admitted the possibility of there having been historical divergence, so at that point all I had to decide was how much I wanted things to change, and then provide what was hopefully a plausible explanation for how things got the way they were. I decided I liked the idea of Floyd living in a Paris which hadn't undergone an occupation. When I started working on the book, I had a much more divergent history in mind, one in which the entire track of the 20th century was different and there was no rise of Nazism and no second World War. But as the book progressed, I found myself—largely for incidental reasons, it has to be said—having to narrow down the point of divergence to somewhere in the middle-to-late '30s. At that point it didn't seem likely that the war could be stopped in its entirety, so I started casting around for a reason why it might have been curtailed. I talked to various people, played with various scenarios (including a divided Paris, with a Berlin-style wall, an image which survives in the book in ghostly form) and in the end happened upon Julian Jackson's book about the 1940 invasion, The Fall of France (2004).
In my book, World War II is avoided because of the deliberate intervention of agents from outside seeking to hold that world at a certain technological level, rather than because they care about the people who would have died in the war. Their intervention continues in the years that follow (Chatelier and his Slasher allies have reached positions of real political power in the world), so in that sense the experiment is not allowed to run in its pure form. The world continues to be held back; science continues to be stifled, fascist totalitarianism continues to be the order of the day, because it is an effective tool for suppressing innovation. Whereas—who knows? Looking at the problems of the world today, it's difficult to imagine how things could have been very much worse. Perhaps the world would indeed have been a better place without World War II. On the other hand, perhaps one would have seen the continuation of the '30s mindset into the present, with all the nasty ideological baggage that went with that decade. I've recently come across a great quote by Nye Bevan: "Fascism is not in itself a new order of society. It is the future refusing to be born." I wish I'd picked up that quote before Century Rain was finished.
I have to say that when I started writing Century Rain, I had no intention of engaging with these issues. I just wanted to write a book about the rediscovery of an intact Earth after the real one has been destroyed. But as soon as I started exploring the background of Floyd's timeline, I couldn't avoid treading into these very sensitive areas. I felt timid at first, but then I thought, sod it, it's science fiction; it's supposed to upset people!
Century Rain, like Chasm City, has a strong noir atmosphere—private eye, murder investigation, corrupt cops, the works. Any particular influences here?
Reynolds: I think it's clear from the earlier books that I have a liking for noir, both written and cinematic. The biggest single influence in shaping the atmosphere of the book would have to be the Maigret novels, of which I read a representative sample (I still have about 60 to go!). I tried to mine them for period detail, but it turns out there's surprisingly little of it in them: Simenon makes the reader do all the work of filling in the texture. I should also mention the Berlin Noir books by Philip Kerr, which have always struck me as excellent period thrillers, about a good cop doing his best to work within a bad regime. And Casablanca, obviously, which is simply one of my favorite films of all time.
What's next for you? You do have some impressive short stories out—"Zima Blue," "Beyond the Aquila Rift" ...
Reynolds: I'm working on a couple of novella-length things for book projects, plus I have a few vague ideas that may turn into stories before very long. "Zima Blue," which you mention, brought back the roving journalist Carrie Clay from my Mars Probes tale, "The Real Story" (2002), and now that I've found a use for her, I'm tempted to write something else with her in. There is still a plan to put out a collection at some point, but the stumbling block is me not having had enough time to restore and assemble all the stories. I also need to write two or three original ones for the collection. I'm hoping to get it together sooner rather than later, though.
On the novel front, I'm about 30,000 words into the next book, which is provisionally entitled Chasing Janus. Again, it's a departure from the universe of the Inhibitor books. It's more of a traditional hard-SF novel than Century Rain, and a bit more rigorously hard SF than any of the others. It begins in our solar system, 50 years from now, and follows the crew of a comet-mining spacecraft as they investigate what may be an alien spacecraft disguised as one of Saturn's moons. I haven't forsaken the Inhibitor universe, but one of the reasons for doing another standalone book is because I want to explore multiple interacting alien cultures from an angle I can't do within the frame of the Inhibitor books. It's also another take on the Fermi paradox—hopefully one that Stephen Baxter hasn't thought up already!
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