You want to see some notes? Here are some notes.
Dimitri escapes.
Dimitri finds Petrova
They go for a walk. They talk about what she did in the past, how she was rdiculed.
They go back to the apartment. He gives her the musical box.
The men come for him. They aren’t interested in Petrova. Dimitri knows that something bad is going to happen to him, but he’s resigned to it—almost happy, knowing that he has let Petrova know she was right.
Only tell story from Dimitri POV. All along there are clues to the fact that any one who came into contact with the Machine ends up a little insane. In fact, it seems to be spreading—just being in contact with the survivors of the mission seems to be having an un-hinging effect.
Make it that Yakov’s madness didn’t start until they were very close to the Matryoshka.
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.
SLEEPOVER
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:
Someone is woken from the sleep because one of the wardens has been killed. At first they don’t remember what has happened. Post-revival amnesia. They’re given a series of refresher lectures about what’s happened to the world and why it’s the way it is. They vaguely remember the world as it was. The world now is beautiful and bleak, a depopulated wilderness with just a few thousand waking wardens to tend to the vast sleeper cubes which dot the landscape.
Meanwhile reality is under constant siege. Weird things keep happening—strange structures in the sky, rifts and dislocations. Spillage from the transcendental war between the AI s, being fought in the interstitial gaps of reality. Humans as a computational burden that can not be allowed.
Story about the accepting of a duty of care. The moral act of duty and self-sacrifice. Would they be given an ultimatum or allowed to return to sleep? What if they found out they had been revived and put back several times, each time refusing to take on the burden?
What single thing would be sufficient to push someone into changing their mind? What would they need to witness or experience? Someone else’s act of self-sacrifice? Evidence of same? Some pathetic act of animal cruelty that makes them realise they can do better than that, being human?
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.
VAINGLORY
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.
TRAUMA POD
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.
THE LAST LOG OF THE LACHRIMOSA
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.
THE WATER THIEF
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.
THE OLD MAN AND THE MARTIAN SEA
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.
IN BABELSBERG
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.
Also by Alastair Reynolds from Gollancz:
Novels
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)
Short Story Collections:
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
www.gollancz.co.uk
Table of Contents
Title Page
Great Wall of Mars
Weather
Beyond the Aquila Rift
Minla’s Flowers
Zima Blue
Fury
The Star Surgeon’s Apprentice
The Sledge-Maker’s Daughter
Diamond Dogs
Thousandth Night
Troika
Sleepover
Vainglory
Trauma Pod
The Last Log of the Lachrimosa
The Water Thief
The Old Man and the Martian Sea
In Babelsberg
Story Notes
Also by Alastair Reynolds from Gollancz:
Copyright
with friends
Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds Page 87