Interview With Alastair Reynolds

Alastair Reynolds is one of my favourite SF authors. I've read almost every book he's written since discovering his Revelation Space series. If you haven't read any of his books, I'd recommend starting with either his Poseidon's Children series or the novel, Pushing Ice, which starts out in a setting something like the Expanse series, but goes much, much, farther out. Two of his short stories were adapted as part of the animated Netflix series, Love, Death, and Robots.

The Estonian magazine, Reaktor, has published a long interview with him, which is reproduced on his blog.

Reaktor: In current times, there are lot of tensions and instability in world politics, not to mention major processes close to your home like Brexit. Are you affected by these debates and political games? Do you transfer and alter some aspects from current political or socio-economical events into your books? 

AR: They oppress me terribly. I’m a child of the Cold War. I grew up in the firm and certain knowledge that a nuclear exchange between the West and East was all but inevitable at some point, probably before the end of the twentieth century. I don’t know anyone of my generation who didn’t feel the same way. It was drummed into us all the time. Then, by some miracle, we escaped from under that shadow. Nuclear weapons remain a grave concern, and proliferation must be resisted, but at the same time it seemed as if we’d dodged that particular bullet, and emerged stumbling into sunlight and hope. The Berlin Wall came down. Nelson Mandela was released! The world seemed to be on a better track, one that put racism, nationalism and militarism behind us. But we all know that wasn’t to last and now we seem beset by old-world politics of the worst kind, everywhere we look. Idiots in the White House, idiots in Downing Street. The total, shaming idiocy of Brexit. I was never going to be a fan, given that I lived in the Netherlands for nearly two decades and benefited from the ease of movement of EU rules. My wife is French; her family are scattered across half of Europe. I am a European to the marrow, a Federalist, and always will be.

I don’t write in a vacuum, so these real-world factors are bound to seep into my books, by choice or otherwise. I saw House of Suns as a “post-911” book as it deals, on certain levels, with authority, retribution and the use of torture as a means of intelligence-gathering. Similar themes play out in The Prefect, and ten years later they were still echoing through Elysium Fire. That has been called a Brexit-themed book and there is some truth in that, but I started it long before the referendum, or Trump’s election. What I was most concerned about was the rise of demagoguery. I had one selfish fear, which was that the world would improve before the book came out, and the likes of Trump and Farage would be consigned to the dustbin of history. But things have only got worse. That said, I still remain a stubborn optimist in the long-run.