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

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:

Very distant future on Mars. Lots of exotic weirdness, radical technologies, off-hand strangeness. Huge sense of historic density. Layers of previous civilisations and settlements. Digging through the ruins of the past. Young adult protagonist. Terraforming as good or bad thing. Mars as the epicenter of human civilisation, Earth a backwater. Interstellar travellers returning after centuries away. A dare that goes wrong. Martian lineman. War veterans. Mars being moved into a different orbit, its gravity altered .

A history lesson. Field trip that goes wrong, bored kids and teacher run into trouble when they activate some ancient, buried technology. What comes to their rescue?

Autonomous construction/terraforming machines left over from the past. Huge enigmatic machines that prowl the outskirts of Mars, left mainly to their own devices .

Active, resourceful protagonist .

Stowaway on a robot cargo dirigible that runs into trouble .

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.

Revelation Space

Redemption Ark

Absolution Gap

Chasm City

Century Rain

Pushing Ice

The Prefect

House of Suns

Terminal World

Blue Remembered Earth

On the Steel Breeze

Poseidon’s Wake

The Medusa Chronicles (with Stephen Baxter)

Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days

Galactic North

Zima Blue

Copyright

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Gollancz

an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

An Hachette UK Company

This eBook first published in 2016 by Gollancz.

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Collection copyright © Dendrocopos Limited 2016

“Great Wall of Mars” Copyright © Alastair Reynolds 2000. First appeared in Spectrum SF #1, February

“Weather” Copyright © Alastair Reynolds 2006. First appeared in Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds, Gollancz/Orion, 2006

“Beyond the Aquila Rift” Copyright © Alastair Reynolds 2005. First appeared in Constellations: The Best of New British SF, ed. by Peter Crowther, DAW Books, 2005.

“Minla’s Flowers” Copyright © Alastair Reynolds 2007. First appeared in The New Space Opera, ed. by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan, Eos/Harper Collins, 2007

“Zima Blue” Copyright © Alastair Reynolds 2005. First appeared in Postscripts, Summer 2005

“Fury” Copyright © Alastair Reynolds 2008. First appeared in Eclipse Two: New Science Fiction and Fantasy ed. by Jonathan Strahan, Night Shade Books, 2008

“The Star Surgeon’s Apprentice” Copyright © Alastair Reynolds 2008. First appeared in The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows, ed. by Jonathan Strahan, Viking, 2008

“The Sledge-Maker’s Daughter” Copyright © Alastair Reynolds 2007. First appeared in Interzone #209, April 2007

“Diamond Dogs” Copyright © Alastair Reynolds 2001. First appeared in Diamond Dogs by Alastair Reynolds, PS Publishing, 2001

“Thousandth Night” Copyright © Alastair Reynolds 2005. First appeared in One Million A.D. ed by Gardner Dozois, Science Fiction Book Club, 2005

“Troika” Copyright © Alastair Reynolds 2010. First appeared in Godlike Machines ed. by Jonathan Strahan, Science Fiction Book Club, 2010

“Sleepover” Copyright © Alastair Reynolds 2010. First published in The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF, ed. by Mike Ashley, Robinson Publishing Ltd., 2010

“Vainglory” Copyright © Alastair Reynolds 2012. First appeared in Edge of Infinity, ed. by Jonathan Strahan, Solaris Books, 2012

“Trauma Pod” Copyright © Alastair Reynolds 2012. First appeared in Armored, ed. John Joseph Adams, Baen, 2012

“The Last Log of the Lachrimosa” Copyright © Alastair Reynolds 2014. First appeared in Subterranean Magazine, Summer 2014

“The Water Thief” Copyright © Alastair Reynolds 2012. First appeared in Arc 1.1: The Future Always Wins, ed. by Sumit Paul-Choudhury and Simon Ings, 2012

“The Old Man and the Martian Sea” Copyright © Alastair Reynolds 2011. First appeared in Life on Mars: Tales from the New Frontier, ed. by Jonathan Strahan, Viking, 2011

“In Babelsberg” Copyright © Alastair Reynolds 2014. First appeared in Reach for Infinity, ed. by Jonathan Strahan, 2014

“Story Notes” Copyright © Alastair Reynolds 2016. Original to this collection

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

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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

ISBN (eBook) 978 1 473 21637 2

Printed in Great Britain by [printer]

www.alastairreynolds.com

www.orionbooks.co.uk