Alastair Reynolds: Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds

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:

Emperor’s head of personal security, defusing assassination attempts. He is informed that a process has already begun which will result in the emperor’s death. He must race against time to find out the nature of the attack .

Palace architect. Hidden rooms .

Winchester mystery house .

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.