Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds

STORY NOTES FOR Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds

IN HIS GREAT novel about elevator repair mechanics, Colson Whitehead talks about “empiricists” and “intuitionists” as the two primary (and competing) schools of elevator repair mechanics. I’m not an elevator repair mechanic, but I am an intuitionist. I’d love to be able to diagram the exact flow of mental processes that results in the creation of a story, from the first faint spark of an idea, all the way through to the lovingly polished, structurally and thematically harmonious final product, ready to be showered with awards and acclaim. If I could do that—if I could outline the systematics of the process—then I might stand a chance of being able to repeat it on demand, like a production line. But the truth is, after writing and publishing more than sixty short stories, many of which were not short by any reasonable measure, I suspect I’m no nearer an understanding of this game than when I started out.

Maybe just a little bit—but not much.

Most published short stories are successes on at least some level. They’re at least readable, or at least have a plot or a point. A very few manage to succeed in several facets at once, and still fewer achieve a gemlike perfection which shines down the ages. Most stories—if we’re going to be honest about it, though - are abject failures. They fail to work on any significant level, or they fail even to be finished. In some cases, they fail even to be started. They might exist as disembodied fragments, or orphaned, cryptic notes in some notebook or computer folder. It doesn’t look like this way to the outside world, because writers—like most people—don’t tend to advertise their catastrophes. My sixty-odd published stories constitute the iceberg’s tip, barely hinting at a vast submerged catalogue of failures and fragments and things that may or may not go somewhere one day. I am constantly mining the lower reaches of this iceberg for material, and occasionally entire stories calve off it and achieve a life of their own, sometimes quite unexpectedly. But the fact remains. Each and every story fragment is something that was started in the sincere belief that it was going to turn into a worthwhile finished story—and most of them didn’t. So what the hell do I know about short stories, anyway?

Not much, then. But I sort of remember a few of the things that were going through my head when I wrote some of them, and—thanks to date-stamped notes and files—I’ve got a vague grasp of when decisions were taken, paths abandoned, other roads followed. That’s not quite the same as being able to reconstruct the exact creative trajectory that took me from first idea to finished story, and I’ll try not to pretend that it is. But I hope that some of the following comments are of interest.

MY FIRST NOVEL, Revelation Space, came out in 2000, but I’d been playing around with some of the underlying ideas for at least a decade before that. The origins of that book go back to an unfinished novel I started in 1986, and some of the short stories I wrote in the nineties could be seen to belong to the same future history. But I hadn’t really given serious thought to how far I should take it until I got a publishing deal and was forced to think ahead to my next couple of books. Gradually I started to think in terms of an extended future history, taking my model from Larry Niven’s Known Space sequence, and one of the things that most interested was to dig right back into the roots of my invented universe. “Great Wall of Mars” has the earliest setting of any of the stories to date, and it helped firm up the foundations for some of the ideas and factions in the novels.

As far as the central idea of the Wall goes, it all came out of a doodle. I’m an inveterate doodler and a great believer in the power of drawing to liberate areas of the imagination that might not be accessed through conscious effort. When I doodle something, and get an unexpected buzz from it, I know that I’ve stumbled on a connection or image I wouldn’t otherwise have found.

WHEN THE OPPORTUNITY came to gather the existing Revelation Space stories into a collection, it was felt that the addition of some new material would be welcome. I approached this prospect with some trepidation, not having written anything in the universe for a couple of years, but when I got down to it, the stories proved to come surprisingly easily, with each seeming to build on the momentum of the last. Perhaps it was just the right time for it. I should have kept going, really, but alas I only had time for the three new ones, of which “Weather” is probably my favorite, perhaps because of its clean, simple structure and the fact that there’s a strange love story at the heart of it.

PETER CROWTHER WAS putting together an anthology entitled Constellations and kindly asked me if I might be able to contribute a piece. At first I didn’t think I had anything to offer, but after cycling to town I found an idea forming, and by the time I got back home I was pretty sure I could make a story out of it. I’m always a little cautious when I get that optimistic rush, as so often it doesn’t result in anything—see my remarks about the sunken part of the iceberg—but in this case the story did in fact develop fairly painlessly. I don’t think the structure, with its alternating sections, really came clear to me until close to the final draft, but once I had it, I knew it was a strong story, and I’m still very pleased with it.

THE BETTER PART of twenty years ago, during a long holiday in California, I sat down with a notepad and a pen on Santa Monica beach and started writing the first draft of a story about a character called Griffin. I wrote some more of the story in the back of a car driving up the Pacific Coast Highway, and then finished the whole thing in Burbank, Los Angeles. When I returned to the Netherlands (where I was living at the time), I redrafted the story onto computer and made some significant changes along the way, including altering the main character’s name to Merlin. The story was set in the deep, distant future—at least seventy-two thousand years from now—but there’s an epic, mythological sweep which I think resonated well with the Arthurian symbolism of the name. But Merlin isn’t actually named after the Welsh Wizard of Camelot, although of course I like the connection. Almost all the human characters in Merlin’s society take their name from birds, a fascination of mine, and I quickly found that there were more than enough obscure avian species to stock the average SF universe.

I’ve returned to Merlin’s saga twice, and this is the most recent of the pieces, though chronologically sitting between the second and first pieces. “Minla’s Flowers” is about the hazards of meddling, even with the best of intentions, as well as being a parable about the corrosive effects of political power. I don’t think it takes great perspicacity to relate Minla’s character to a certain British Prime Minister of the late nineteen seventies and early eighties, who also believed that there was no such thing as society. Will there be more Merlin stories? I hope so.

I DON’T THINK writers consciously set out to make certain tropes more or less prominent in their writing; it just develops organically over the course of things, and sometimes we’re the last to notice it happening. The old, forgetful robot is certainly a recurring trope of mine, but I don’t think I had a clue about that when I wrote “Zima Blue”. I’d been thinking about the idea of the robot as family heirloom, though, being passed down from generation to generation, and altered/upgraded along the way (possibly to the point where the robot didn’t really understand its own origins) but I couldn’t find my way into the story that would make the best use of this idea. Frustrated after several days of bashing my head against a blank computer screen, I gave up on the creative process and went for a swim. Without giving too much away, that’s where I got the idea for the origin of the robot in this story.

I think this is as good an example of any as to why you can’t force short stories to come at anything other than their natural pace. Having the idea about the robot as heirloom was only part of the puzzle. The swimming pool connection was another. But even those two components only really linked together when I started thinking about International Klein Blue, and that only happened because I’d been idly leafing through an art book, trying to come up with names for spaceships.

HERE’S ANOTHER “OLD robot” story. Typical, eh? You wait ages for one and then two come along at once. Jonathan Strahan was soliciting stories for his Eclipse series of original anthologies, and I was happy to take a try with this one. The root of this story, though, of a Galactic Emperor’s personal security specialist—who just happens to be a robot—goes back to an abandoned draft for another commission entirely. Here are the notes I wrote to myself back at the start of the process, in early 2007:

After ditching that story, I started afresh and wrote The Six Directions of Space, a completely different piece. But something called me back to those notes and the result, a year and a half later, was “Fury”. What’s interesting, though, is that reference to the Winchester Mystery House, a famous and spooky tourist attraction near San Jose, California. I’d visited the house in 2002 and it had lodged in my imagination sufficiently that I obviously felt I needed to mine it for a story. What actually happened—later in 2007—was that it ended up becoming part of the fabric of House of Suns, albeit transmogrified into a rambling, many-roomed asteroid habitat a thousand years from now.

THE ENERGETIC JONATHAN Strahan was assembling a collection of Young Adult science fiction stories entitled The Starry Rift and I was kindly approached to offer a story. I’d had the title in mind for a while, but not much an idea of what to do with it. Once I started writing, though, the action flowed more or less effortlessly and I had a great deal of fun with some of the gruesome details of this quasi-gothic-space-horror piece, which just happens to be another strange love story. Tonally, it’s quite similar to some of my Revelation Space pieces, but I think it would have been a struggle to shoehorn it into that universe, so I didn’t bother.

I’ve written a handful of stories for younger readers, and my approach is pretty much indistinguishable from my normal writing process. I just write the pieces and only then worry about the content. If a word, paragraph or scene needs to be changed here and there, fine, but I don’t set out with some vastly different structural methodology. Really I only know one way to write, and I’m still trying to get good at that.

I SPENT THREE years of my life in Newcastle, on the Northeast coast of England. Newcastle is a wonderful, friendly city in a beautiful part of the country, with a history going back thousands of years. Once it marked the limit of Roman occupation, with only the unruly wilds of Scotland to the north, and the crumbling remains of Hadrian’s Wall still stir the imagination today. Years after my time in Newcastle, I found my imagination being drawn back to the River Tyne, only this time thousands of years in the future, after some climate-shifting catastrophe has thrown the world (or at least this part of it) into a mini ice-age. I’d been inspired by hearing about the Frost Fairs, those temporary encampments set up on the frozen Thames in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and I started thinking about a kind of future Frost Fair, in which the barely understood goods of earlier eras and cultures might be bartered and admired. One of the things that always interests me in SF is the juxtaposition of past and future technologies and cultures. If you’ve read more than a little of my work you’ll have probably noticed the intrusion of Medieval symbols and imagery, from stained glass windows to cathedrals to resting knights on tombs. I was pleased with the way this story came out, especially as I was able to sell it to Interzone as my first submission to the magazine’s new editorial regime. I think I had vague intentions of digging deeper into this world, but so far there is just this one piece. Perhaps I need to go back to Newcastle.

I WAS NEVER very good at it, but for a while I took up rock climbing. In fact it’s how I met my wife, who was also a keen (and incidentally much better) climber. Although I still enjoy hillwalking, I gave up on climbing itself, but I’ve never stopped being fascinated by reading about mountaineers and their exploits. In any given year, I can pretty much guarantee that one of the best books I’ll have read will be a mountaineering book. I also devour TV documentaries about Everest, K2, the Eiger and so on. It was while watching one of these programs that I started thinking about the peculiar allure of dangerous spaces, and the mentality that will bring a mountaineer back to a place year after year, even though it’s a kind of extended game of odds in which the stakes range from frostbite to severe injury or death. From that, it was only a hop and skip to a science fictional idea about an alien artefact that enacts a punishing toll on those who would dare to penetrate its mysteries, and yet which seems to have no end of volunteers ready to submit to its hazards.

This is well-trodden ground in SF, though, and I felt a conscious tip of the hat needed to be made to the seminal novel Rogue Moon, by the writer Algys Budrys. My story comes at the problem from a different angle, but there are thematic similarities, and I felt it was only honest to acknowledge the inspiration. I also threw in a couple of sly nods to the films Cube and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that almost everyone gets those but almost no one gets the Rogue Moon reference.

I wrote the piece and felt that it had come out fairly well. But Peter Crowther, who’d commissioned it from me, felt that the ending could use an even darker twist. Peter suggested roughly where I might take it, and the result is unquestionably a much better story. I was reading Poe while I wrote this, by the way, as well as Robert Browning, and it pleases me that the David Bowie song of the same title also references Browning—but a quite different one.

THE EDITOR, ANTHOLOGIST and writer Gardner Dozois was one of the first figures in American SF to take any notice of my work, and I’ve been enormously grateful for his support and generosity ever since. Gardner was putting together a collection of long novellas set at least one million years in the future, and I was invited to contribute a piece.

Ever since I encountered Arthur C Clarke’s seminal The City and the Stars, I’ve loved reading and writing about the very far future. The Merlin stories take place a long time from today, but this was the chance to go really deep, and revel in the possibilities of immense spans of time and history, from a vantage point from which our own time is barely a geological sliver, if it’s remembered at all. For this piece, I homed in on an idea that had been floating around in my head for a while, that of some vast family reunion after a grand cycle of galactic exploration. The stellar engineering hinted at in this story is speculative, to say the least, but it isn’t completely without some basis in solid thinking—see, for instance, some of the wilder cosmological fancies in “Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition”, by the science writer Ed Regis.

Later, I returned to the characters and basic premise of this story for the setting of my novel House of Suns, although the plots are quite different. Whether the one could be considered a distant prequel to the other, I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.

THIS ONE WAS written for “Godlike Machines”, an anthology edited by Jonathan Strahan about alien artefacts and other such enigmatic mega-structures. It’s as good an example as I can think of how non-linear the creative process can be, and how it’s all but futile to impose some kind of ad-hoc narrative on the development of a story. I’d had a mental flash of a dark limousine driving through a blizzard, and scribbled an idea down onto a scrap of paper, something like “cosmonauts driven mad by Prokofiev” and left it at that. I then spent a couple of months chasing completely the wrong story up and down any number of trees and through any number of rabbit holes, before realising that it just wasn’t working. The abandoned piece didn’t have anything to do with blizzards or cosmonauts or Prokofiev. It was a hopelessly ambitious attempt to tell a story about an alien artefact that crashes into the Earth and undermines our technology and language, while at the same time reversing our sense of the flow of time, so what we think of the artefact’s arrival was actually its departure, and instead of perceiving a technological decline we perceived a technological acceleration…you get the idea. Or maybe you don’t. Trust me, it looked like a winner on the White Board.

At some point, frustrated by my failure to get this story off the ground, I walked away from it and realised I need to get back to something I actually had a chance of writing. That’s when I went back to the scribbled fragment and started writing Troika instead. This one wasn’t easy, either. There were setbacks and days when I couldn’t see my way through the thing. But what got me through it was a conviction that there was a way, if only I could find it, and that’s a crucial difference. I never had that with the earlier piece.

You want to see some notes? Here are some notes.

At the end of the story, we find that it isn’t Dimitri who’s escaped, it’s his doctor, who’s gone off the rails so completely that he’s started thinking he was one of the crew. Story needs to be retold as first person to give it that immediacy, and so we aren’t pulling the wool over the reader’s eyes. The doctor has revised the mission files so exhaustively that he started to identify, then assume, the personality of the mission’s sole survivor.

THIS STORY CAME out of a very vague set of notes for a novel that was never to be. I don’t, as a rule, keep huge reams of detailed story ideas lying around. But in this case I’d began serious preparatory work on what would have been the book that came out in place of House of Suns, before deciding (spurred by an email from a reader) that House of Suns was the thing I really wanted to work on next. A year or two later, I’d lost the sense that there was a novel’s worth in this material, but it still seemed interesting enough to warrant expansion into a short story. Here are some of the notes I worked from:

Not to come over all Philip K Dick, but this one actually goes back to a vision. Well, not quite a vision. But in my early teens, during a long wet walk in driving cold rain, soaked to my skin—a typical English summer, in other words—I ended up at the side of a water reservoir somewhere in the Midlands. Jutting out into the water was some kind of treatment facility, consisting of a metal gangway ending in a blocky windowless grey structure rising from the reservoir. Under leaden, miserable skies, confronted by grey waters and grimly impersonal machinery, I had an almost visceral jolt of what the world would be like if only machines were left to look after anything. I might be guilty of exactly the kind of post-hoc rationalisation I already warned about, but I’m as sure as I can be that the grey waters and grey structures of Sleepover’s bleak, depopulated world connect back to that rain-soaked epiphany. But the story’s also about the miraculous human capacity for adaptation to almost any set of circumstances, and somewhere along the line I think it manages to find a rare glimmer of optimism.

A LOT OF my stories revolve around art or artists, now that I come to think about it. At the risk of hopeless reductionism, I’m pretty much convinced that my brain was wired for art, rather than science. I’ve never been entirely at ease with numbers, and mathematics has seldom felt like a native language to me. At school, I was expected to go into illustration or some aspect of creative writing. But it was science that pulled me the hardest, and so I learned to work around my analytic limitations while putting art to one side while I trained to become an astronomer. I suppose it was only natural, though, that a latent interest in visual expression would start to seep out into my fiction, whether I wanted to or not. Here, with this tale of a sculptural installation gone somewhat awry, it’s very much to the fore.

THIS WAS A straightforward case of the title coming before the story. I’d read an article about the US military developing the next generation of battlefield medicine, using robotics and telepresence technology to develop a “pod” in which an injured soldier could be placed and operated on, even in the middle of the theatre of war. I filed the name of this “trauma pod” away for future use, and then waited for the story to arrive. Eventually I was invited to write a piece featuring some aspect of “power armour” for an anthology being developed by John Joseph Adams, and it seemed as good a time as any to dust off that story title.

I KEEP TELLING people that I’m not done with the Revelation Space universe, but in the absence of new novels, the only way to keep delivering on that promise is to write new short stories. Before “Last Log”, the previous one had been “Monkey Suit”, from 2009, so it was high time to produce something new. The story had a long, difficult gestation, taking several years to get straight. I think people sometimes imagine that I’m deliberately holding back from doing more Revelation Space stories, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The problem is that they’re quite hard to write. Although the Revelation Space universe is huge, spanning thousands of years and hundreds of worlds and cultures, the narrative space, at least from where I’m seated, is already pretty congested. The stories also need to have some functional independence from each other. You have to figure that at least one reader won’t have read anything else by you before, so you can’t overload on backstory and obscure references to other events in the universe.

ARC, A NEW publishing venture launched under the wing of New Scientist, invited me to submit a short story with a relatively near-future setting. At the time I was deep in the early stages of the Poseidon’s Children sequence of novels, and it seemed natural to dig a little earlier into that future history and take a look at events on Earth in the middle decades of the twenty-first century. I set my story in a kind of transit camp where migrant workers—forced to flee by climate change and resource shortages—earn a crust using cheap but ubiquitous telepresence technology doing menial chores elsewhere on the planet—or in this case, on the Moon. It’s actually a pretty pure example of “Mundane SF”, in that nothing that happens in the story requires any science or technology not already on the drawing boards, if not already with us.

AFTER THE SUCCESS of The Starry Rift, Jonathan Strahan began casting the net out for young adult stories set on future iterations of Mars. This was my attempt, and although the story was straightforward enough—by which I mean that it didn’t throw me any particular curves during the writing—it was executed under incredibly difficult circumstances. My father had been diagnosed with terminal cancer in the late summer of 2009, and was not expected to survive much longer than spring of the following year. My father was out of hospital and receiving palliative care at his home, and I’d drive down to visit him as often as possible. On one of those trips, I brought this story to work on during a quiet few hours in the afternoon. I remember my father being very happy when I told him that I’d finished a piece of fiction—I think it cheered him up to have some “normal” activity going on around him at such an utterly surreal time. As it was, my father died only a few weeks after his diagnosis, and this was the last piece of fiction I produced until well into the following year. Up to a point, writing can be a release from the pressures of life, but sooner or later—in my experience, at least—life will trump the ability to write.

Here are some of the notes that preceded this piece:

In the background details of this story, incidentally you can see in germinal form some of the ideas I later fleshed out in the Poseidon’s Wake sequence. Given what becomes of Mars in those books, though, I think we can pretty easily rule out them sharing the same universe as this piece.

EVEN SPACE PROBES have Twitter accounts now (if you’re reading this more than six months in the future, incidentally, please delete “Twitter” and substitute whatever social media tool is the New Thing) and it occurred to me that it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch for space probes to start handling their own PR, fielding questions, doing the chat show circuit and so on. It’s a frivolous enough idea, but it also plays into one of my slightly more serious hobbyhorses: the notion that space exploration won’t belong to robots or people exclusively, as the debate is usually framed, but to some as-yet-undreamt-of hybrid of the two.