British - Author | March 13, 1966 -
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.
Alastair Reynolds
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I've never had much interest in spinoffery - the idea of writing in someone else's universe generally leaves me cold - but 'Doctor Who' is different. I've grown up with it. It's been part of my life since I was tiny, watching Jon Pertwee on a grainy black and white television in Cornwall and being terrified out of my mind.
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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.
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For me, the distant future and far-off galaxies is where it's at. That's where my imagination can really come out to play.
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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.
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I'm a wishy-washy 'Guardian' reader, but the last thing I want to do is force a political agenda down people's throats. It's not central to my work, unlike, say, China Mieville, who's very politicised.
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I always like Iain Banks science fiction stuff and William Gibson's cyberpunk stuff from the 1980s.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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I come at it from a different angle of attack with each novel, searching for the technological texture the story demands. There isn't a recipe; it's more of an instinct.
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