Alastair Reynolds - Blue Remembered Earth

We have no time for anything else.

Huge thanks are due to Tim Kauffman, Louise Kleba, Kotska Wallace and Joan Wamae – and not least my wife – for agreeing to read an early draft of this novel and offering their comments and suggestions. Up-and-coming writer Jonathan Dotse was also kind enough to make time during a visit to London to talk about Africa and science fiction, from a uniquely Ghanaian perspective. For specific discussions on exoplanets and breakthrough physics, I thank my brilliant and talented scientist friends Lisa Kaltenegger and Dave Clements. I am indebted to all of you for your time and insights. The faults of the book, of course, remain my responsibility alone.

I spent the first decade of my professional writing career under the able editorship of Jo Fletcher, not only a trusted colleague but also a good friend. By the time Jo left to run her own imprint we had already been discussing this book for several years. There’s no doubting her influence on BLUE REMEMBERED EARTH, and some of that influence, I’m sure, will continue to be felt in later instalments of the Akinya saga. In particular, it was Jo’s immediate fondness for the elephants that made me determined to make them much more than background dressing. Thank you, Jo!

By the same token, it has been a delight to work with my new editor, Simon Spanton – all round good bloke and a man with a deep passion for the core virtues of science fiction. It is no easy thing to take on an established writer halfway through their career; Simon has given me nothing but support and friendship. Respect!

Once again, it has been a pleasure to work with the brilliant and meticulous Lisa Rogers, who has been my line editor for most of my career – there is, I suspect, no sharper pair of eyes in the business, nor anyone better equipped to impose sense on my often muddled approach to internal chronology. Thanks, Lisa!

I am also hugely indebted to my agent, Robert Kirby, for years of support and enthusiasm. Like Jo, Robert has been in on this book since the beginning. Deep into a big project, it’s easy to forget why one ever thought it was a great idea in the first place. Robert has always managed to give me that motivational impulse, whenever I felt my energy flagging. Again, it’s been a pleasure.

The genesis of this book – one strand of it, anyway – goes back to the first in a series of visits to the Kennedy Space Center. My wife and I have been fortunate enough to witness two launches of the Space Shuttle Atlantis – literally unrepeatable experiences. For allowing me to get closer to a launch than I ever dreamed I would, I thank Tim Kauffman, Louise Kleba and Piers Sellers – all fine people, still committed to the idea of human space exploration. It has also been a pleasure and privilege to spend time with Steve Agid, who knows more about the past, present and future of manned and unmanned spaceflight than almost anyone on the planet.

Much of the technology in this book is speculative, but quite a lot of it is based on real ideas and proposals, none of which involve breaking the laws of physics. Space elevators, ballistic launchers, VASIMR drives, even metallic-hydrogen-fuelled rockets and the direct imaging of exoplanet surfaces, are all technologies that have been discussed in the ‘serious literature’ – indeed, some of these concepts are well on the way to being realised.

At the moment we lack a ‘Theory of Everything’, a single, all-enveloping physical theory that would tie together both the behaviour of matter at the grandest of scales – the dynamics of black holes and galactic superclusters – and the smallest, the fizzing, fuzzy realm of subatomic processes. Despite this, we have some promising candidate ideas. We also live in an era of truly exciting experimentation, with projects like the ongoing Large Hadron Collider pushing into energies which may enable competing theories to be tested against each other. It’s too soon to say what the outcome of these studies will be. Perhaps conservatively, I have assumed that the theoretical physics of Eunice’s time is not radically different from our own. However, the breakthrough on Mercury, with its supposed connection to quark-quark interactions and subsequent application as a new form of spacecraft engine, is entirely fanciful – very much ‘made-up’ science.

There is no such world as Crucible, although the star 61 Virginis is believed to have a planetary system, and the presence of an Earthlike world is not yet ruled out. The field of exoplanet research is moving so rapidly that I fully expect to be caught out by observations within the lifetime of this book. But that’s the joy of speculating in a rapidly evolving discipline.

There is a monolith on Phobos, but no one seriously believes that it’s anything other than a slightly unusual (but not all that odd) geological feature. Obtaining close-up images of this long-shadow-casting object will doubtless be a goal for future exploration of the Martian moons. I look forward to seeing what they find.

Two things motivated me to write a science fiction novel in which Africa was the dominant economic and technological power. The first was a simple: why not? I have never been to Africa, but I have no reason to suppose that there is anything that would prevent Africa, or a part of that continent, from assuming global dominance in one or more advanced industries. The second reason, which is rather more personal and heartfelt – and therefore rather more difficult to articulate – is to do with music. In the last five years I have come to love African music and it has formed a great part of my listening during the conception of this book. In particular I would like to mention the amazing Ugandan musician Geoffrey Oryema, who was very much my gateway into a realm of wonderful and surprising discovery. His beautiful song ‘Land of Anaka’, written from an exile’s point of view, conveyed exactly the sense of overwhelming loss that I felt might be shared by space travellers, centuries from now, remembering an Earth to which they could never return.

Which is why I named my central character Geoffrey.

Revelation Space

Redemption Ark

Absolution Gap

Chasm City

Century Rain

Pushing Ice

The Prefect

House of Suns

Terminal World

Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days

Galactic North

Zima Blue

A Gollancz eBook

Copyright © Alastair Reynolds 2012

All rights reserved

The right of Alastair Reynolds to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in Great Britain in 2012 by

Gollancz

The Orion Publishing Group

Orion House

5 Upper St Martin’s Lane

London, WC2H 9EA

An Hachette UK Company

This eBook first published in 2012 by Gollancz.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 575 08831 3

All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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