Elephant hawk-moth caterpillar and Red Admiral

 For your wildlife needs.

Interview with Media Death Cult

 Moid and Chris spent quite a few hours chatting to me last weekend. Here's the result. It's one of the best long-form interviews I've done, so I hope you enjoy it - and thanks to Media Death Cult for the initiative.

Inhibitor Phase out in the world

"Reynolds tells meticulous tales in the hard-SF tradition that invariably pack an emotional punch. Inhibitor Phase, a novel about middle-age, loss and redemption, is a heart-thumping adventure to boot." - The Times.

Publication dates tend to be a little porous these days. Although Inhibitor Phase is not supposed to be out in the UK until the 26th, I'm informed that copies have been spotted in the wild, most notably in Waterstones.

I've signed a quantity of bookplates for said establishment, so while these aren't quite signed editions, they're the next best thing:

https://www.waterstones.com/book/inhibitor-phase/alastair-reynolds/2928377072575

For the time being, if it's a genuine signed hardcover that you're after, you are kindly directed to Anderida Books of Worcester, who should have signed copies in stock immediately (we did a number of them on my kitchen table), and will shortly be selling signed, numbered editions as well:

https://www.anderidabooks.co.uk/product/2739/INHIBITOR-PHASE-Signed-Numbered-First-Edition

As and when I have news about other signed editions, I'll let you know. Obviously some of the usual options are a little difficult at the moment. While Covid restrictions may have eased throughout the UK, I'm remaining cautious and doing as little travel as possible. And, needless to say, if you want an unsigned hardback or trade paperback edition, or an audiobook or ebook, there are a number of online retail concerns who may be able to assist.

More news as it comes.

 

Worth having

 

A simply gorgeous reissue.

https://www.georgeharrison.com/atmp50/

Interview with Forbidden Planet

 In the run-up to the publication of Inhibitor Phase, I did a video interview with Andrew Sumner and Forbidden Planet.

https://forbiddenplanet.com/posts/fptv-alistair-reynolds-introduces-inhibitor-phase/

There's also a short interview with me in the forthcoming issue of SFX, but I don't think that will be available online.

Current reading (just finished):

I thought Simenon was pretty good when I read him 20 years ago, but now he's off the scale. He hasn't changed; I have.

Fireflash

 The Fireflash atonic airliner appeared in the very first Thunderbirds episode "Trapped in the Sky", which is still one of the best, as well as one or two others.

One of Derek Meddings's usual striking designs, it's a fine looking machine with some unusual touches, such as the passenger lounges built into the wings, and the cockpit set way back in the tail. As always, there's something that needs to go wrong, so in the case of Fireflash it's an atomic reactor which needs servicing after every few hours of flight, or everyone dies. Obviously not the ideal configuration in the case of a diversion to Luton or Stanstead. Please stow your trays, put your seat backs into the upright position and be prepared to be exposed to lethal amounts of radiation. Thank you for flying Air Terrainean. We realise you had a choice of carriers and you're probably wishing you went with one of the others.

The kit is the Aoshima 1/350th model, which builds into a compact but bijou Fireflash with a simple assembly and nice, clean parts, There are some variations in the kit to enable gear up or gear down configurations, including folded wing tips, and the kit comes with the International Rescue elevator platforms used to save Fireflash at the end of its maiden voyage. I think it comes with four but I only made three of them. I used Revell and Humbrol paints which seemed to give a reasoable approximation to the colours of the stuodio models. 

All decals and white markings are included, and go on well.

I think it would be nice to have a larger Fireflash but the kit is perfectly nice as it stands.

This and other Aoshima Thunderbirds are kits are now available in the UK under the Adventures in Plastic range, via Bachmann:

https://www.bachmann.co.uk/category/construction-kits/aip

Eagle Transporter

 Hot on the heels of the Zero X post, here's another Gerry Anderson-themed model. I've shown this one before but I thought it might be worth a post on its own, as it's such a iconic design.

I've loved the Eagle Transporter from the moment I saw it, way before Space:1999 itself actually aired in September 1975.

The series had been in development since 1973 and the marketing push was well underway by the start of 1975, and perhaps earlier. I remember seeing a cardboard advertisement for the forthcoming Dinky models in the toy department of Dan Evans, in Barry, a good nine months or more before the show itself arrived.

I don't think this is the in-store advert itself but it had a similar look, with a line-drawn Eagle rather than  a photo of the studio models or the die-cast replica.

The build-up to the series was also stoked by articles in the boy's magazine Speed&Power, to which I've alluded before (it was where I first read Arthur C Clarke, since they serialised many of his stories). I must admit the concept of the show sounded totally fantastic to an eight-year old already a fan of such Anderson shows as UFO and Joe 90. 

The wait for the series was interminable, but I was also anxious to get my hands on a Dinky Eagle, and it was an equally long wait. I ended up with two, in the end: the metallic green Eagle Transporter, and the (slightly more-accurately coloured) white Eagle Freighter. I won one of them in a competition through Speed&Power, correctly answering enough questions in a space-quiz to be one of the happy victors. I still have both of them, although right now I can only put my hands on the Transporter.

If my memory serves me well, another Eagle appeared at the end of the hot summer of '76, from Airfix. I certainly had one, although it's long since disappeared. It was bigger than the Dinky model and from what I can recall, went together easily.

Space:1999 was not the best science fiction show ever made, with generally awful science and some unsatisfying scripts, but it still looks terrific, had a great title sequence, and the sets and model work hold up very well. The Eagles in particular still look very plausible as an all-purpose Lunar transport, with a modular, skeletal design ideally suited to operations in vacuum and low gravity. The show made them do all sorts of things that didn't really sit well with that, though, including shuttling back and forth from habitable planets with atmospheres, despite the almost total lack of aerodynamics. I always thought the show was missing a merchandising trick there by not inventing a second craft that could go where the Eagle couldn't, but perhaps the budget wouldn't permit it. Incidentally, the second series was never aired in Wales so I've still not seen it, but I gather there were some variants on the Eagle introduced for that season. It was very confusing to get my second Space:1999 annual and see the different costumes introduced for the second run, and wonder why I'd never seen those episodes.

A few years ago a new Eagle model came on the market, from MPC. The is a 22 inch kit closely replicating the 48 inch studio model, and as close to an accurate Eagle as one is likely to get. Just as the model-makers on the series raided Airfix and Revell kits for details, so those touches appear on the MPC kit, just shrunk down by half.

I built the kit out of the box and found it to go together very well. The details are excellent and the worst you could say is that some parts of the assembly are a little repetitive, especially the engine pods and the trussing around the front and back bits. The kit includes two Gemini astronaut figures to go in the cockpit, exactly as per the studio model. I thought about lighting it but decided not to, although I could still get into the cockpit if I changed my mind.

One thing it also replicates is how the design doesn't quite work! The arrangement of the windows on the outside of the Eagle didn't match the set used for the cockpit, and there's no way to have a connecting airlock between the front and the rest of the ship.

As a model of the model, though, it's 100% accurate and far better than the Dinky model. Notice how the trussing on the Dinky moulding is much busier, with diagonal bits that shouldn't be there. Presumably the Dinky model had to be beefed-up to work as a toy. Mine certainly picked up a scratch or two. The Dinky model cleverly makes use of relatively few components, too. I don't have an Airfix one to compare but it would be interesting to see how it fares in relation.

The MPC kit came with a pod, but I wasn't sure whether to go with the red-striped version or the more typical plain white. In the end, reasoning that the model would mostly sit in a glass cabinet with only one face visible, I did red on one side and left the other plain. I had to mask and paint the red as it didn't come on the transfer sheet, which was my one real criticism. It's said that the Eagle sits a bit high on its sprung legs, which is probably true, but I didn't feel like altering them.

MPC sell some expensive upgrade kits to replace some of the plastic castings with turned metal assemblies, but I felt the model was fine enough as it came. They have also done a season 2 Eagle with a docking extension on the pod, as well as the freighter with its nuclear-waste handling pod.

Anyway, here's to the Eagle, one of the better 70s spaceship designs, and one that still holds its own.

I've delivered a new book

A couple of days ago I sent in Eversion, which if all goes well should appear in the latter part of next year.  I started thinking seriously about it late last summer, but didn't get really going on it until I'd completed the first round of edits on Inhibitor Phase.

It's a standalone, unrelated to anything else I've done. It's basically a novel about first contact with a "big dumb (or not so dumb) object" but it's a fair bit weirder than that summary might make you think, with (I hope) an unusual approach to both theme and narrative viewpoint. It's also, in its present form, quite a bit shorter than my previous novels. After the relatively long Inhibitor Phase (which is still shorter than its predecessors in the RS universe) I wanted to try delivering a short, sharp, shock of SF, perhaps closer in tone to my novellas such as Troika, Slow Bullets or Permafrost. It's still taken me seven or eight months, though, allowing for time off to work on the Inhibitor edits, and of course this book will in turn eat into my time as I make inroads into the next book. Before that, though, I'm likely to try another novella.

Eversion becomes my eighteenth novel from my primary publisher. For those keeping score. it's the ninth novel in the ten-book sequence I signed up to with Gollancz/Orion/Hachette. It's my nineteenth if you include the Doctor Who title, and my twentieth if one allows The Medusa Chronicles, my collaboration with Stephen Baxter. It's my twenty-second if you include the two novels I wrote in my teens.

You'd think it would be getting easier by now. The only lesson I've learned across all those books is that there will come a point where the creative momentum slows to a halt, the inspiration evaporates, the work feels valueless, and ... you just work through that. Like the graining on Lewis Hamilton's tyres, it will eventually sort itself out. You remember why you were excited about the idea in the first place, and a second wind comes in.

That's really all I learned - just to keep carrying on.

Online with Adrian Tchaikovsky

 A bump for tonight's event (see post below the previous one):

https://www.crowdcast.io/e/tchaikovsky-reynolds-jul2021/register