Top 50 Alastair Reynolds Quotes

I was never strong at maths, but I eventually got onto a university physics/astronomy course, and that led on to my Ph.D. and eventual employment.

One of the big breakthroughs I had as a writer was when I stopped agonising over every word.

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.’

Above all else, ‘Doctor Who’ still seems to me to offer near-infinite scope for the writer. It must be the least constraining of televisual properties.

To be remembered at all is an achievement of sorts.

Daleks scared the hell out of me, to the point where I wouldn’t go round to another boy’s house because he had Dalek wallpaper in his bedroom.

‘Doctor Who’ is part of my science fictional DNA. You could take it out of me, and I’d probably still have ended up being a writer, but almost certainly not the same one.

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.

If you do a certain amount of work every day, it will eventually become a novel.

I’m still bothered by the threat of nuclear war.

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.

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.

Science fiction can be very relevant, could be good literature.

I would much rather we concentrated on the immediate, still-potent dangers, such as nuclear weapons, runaway climate change, and so on. Sort those out, then worry about Hal 9000.

When I’m working on one book, part of my imagination is thinking ahead to the next one.

When I was a kid, I was reliably informed that we’d have gone to Mars by 1985, and of course it’s 2012, and we’re still really no closer to a human expedition to Mars, but that shouldn’t detract from the amazing achievements that are being done on a day-to-day basis by robotic envoys.

I’m just happy to have some American readers – enough that it’s a viable proposition for my books to appear there.

I’ve always had ideas for more books than I can write.

I don’t know why, but American sci-fi writers seem to focus on the near-future, which has given us Brits a clear run at the most fascinating.

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.

In crime, I like Ian Rankin and James Lee Burke. As for historical books, I enjoy Bernard Cornwell, Patrick O’Brien, and C. S. Forester – anything with battleships!

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.

If there’s a story I absolutely cannot tell without faster-than-light travel, then I am quite prepared to accept it – even though I don’t personally believe it is possible.

We live in a science fictional world with things like cloning and face transplants, and things seem to be getting stranger and stranger.

I always say that keeping abreast of science should never be seen as a chore. It should be something you do naturally. I don’t sit there reading ‘New Scientist,’ putting post-it notes next to ideas.

I’m not a morning person: I can’t function until I’ve had a coffee – or several.

It’s not healthy to obsess over every data point, every review or reader comment. I think the first few times you see someone writing about you, you have this massive emotional response to it. But after a while, it all just fades into the background noise.

I prioritise story over science, but not at the expense of being really stupid about it.

I was really impressed by ‘2312.’

I don’t like a lot of what’s published as hard SF. Much of it is right-wing, reactionary crap.

You have to be able to invest in your own creations, to suspend your own disbelief in order to be able to write them. We all have to draw the line somewhere.

I had – and continued to have – great fun exploring the Revelation Space universe, but it was always clear to me that I wanted to write other kinds of books, even within what might be termed the fairly narrow overlapping genre categories of hard SF and space opera.

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.

If the Chinese are the first to the asteroids or the first to Mars, good for them, as far as I’m concerned.

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.

I’m always a little bit cautious around invented terminology because so much science fiction is off-putting to the uninitiated. You open up the first page, and it’s full of all these made-up words.

I couldn’t think of anything more pointless than reading a piece of fiction written by a robot.

I watched ‘Who’ with a mixture of affection and exasperation through the eighties, always ready to cheer on the Doctor but seldom feeling that the series was playing to its strengths. Some of the adventures, revisited on DVD, turn out to be better than I remembered – others just as infuriating.

When you’re writing stuff that’s already clotted with neologisms and trying to get across fairly abstruse concepts, you’re already putting a heavy burden on the reader.

I think I set myself on a course to become a scientist around about the time that Carl Sagan’s ‘Cosmos’ series was on television, and there really was no going back for me at that point, and then I went on to study space science and then get my Ph.D., then go aboard and work in the European Space Agency.

I think the danger with using the term ‘trilogy’ is that it sets up particular expectations in the reader’s mind.

What works for me is simply to read a lot of stuff throughout the year – not with a particular story or theme in mind, but just because you never know what might be useful or interesting in the long run. I much prefer to just absorb a lot of stuff and let the old unconscious chew down on it over time.

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.

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.

Ideas have a certain gestation period that can’t be forced.

It’s true that my stories seem to deal with the end of the world. I’ve often been called the high priest of gothic miserablism, which is slightly unfair.

I’ve always been skeptical of the idea that sentience is going to be an exclusively human attribute.

I’m fascinated by steam engines and with Victorian engineering generally, and as a corollary to that, I’m fascinated by the idea of long-lived technologies.

I’m not massively fond of right-wing nutters or war criminals.

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.