Monday 21 March 2016

New stories for old universes

Pleased to announce that I've sold a pair of stories set in two of my established universes. The first, "Belladonna Nights", takes place in the House of Suns timeline a few million years earlier than the events of the novel. Campion plays a part in the story. This will appear in an as-yet-untitled original anthology with an exceedingly interesting conceptual premise, and I was really thrilled to be able to contribute something.

The second, longer piece, is entitled "The Iron Tactician" and is a new novella featuring my long-running character Merlin. Previous Merlin stories were "Merlin's Gun" (1999), "Hideaway" (2000) and "Minla's Flowers" (2007). The very tentative plan at the moment is that the novella will appear as a standalone chapbook, but we should have a firmer idea in a few months, and of course I'll give fuller details on where these stories will appear in due course.

It was enormously enjoyable to dig back into these two universes, after nearly a decade away from them, and in both instances I felt the distant glimmerings of new story ideas. So we'll see.

14 comments:

  1. Alastair, any updates on publication.. Apologies if I missed any updates.

    ~Paul

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  2. Merlin is hanging out for a novel! Just saying! :)

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  3. House of Suns is such a imaginative story have read it several times was afraid I would never read more from this universe. Excited. Thank You

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  4. Great to hear, I really enjoyed the stories from both universes. Looking forward to these :)

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  5. ...Another Merlin story?

    What a wonderful surprise! I absolutely adored those stories. Still find myself daydreaming about Minla's Flowers occasionally, all these years later- delighted to hear there's going to be another one.

    Day one purchase, as ever.

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  6. I just had some cool thoughts.

    1) They should reboot Star Trek as Hard Scifi epic (no FTL, para-gravity, humanoid aliens, obey laws of physics, at best have stargates that have to be built and dragged STL to other starsystems etc)

    2) Alaystair Reynolds should write a story or two or a book if he has a hankering for it.

    3) Because that would be very cool Universe.

    Cheers people.

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  7. So very excited for Belladonna Nights!! I have read House of Suns multiple times. Ditto Revelation Space, The Prefect, Redemption Arc, Blue Remembered Earth, etc etc.
    You are the best SF writer IMHO, and stand alone, as you capture story/hard sci fi/character/suspense and create the desire to binge read more than any other. Thank you for all your words.

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  8. Pushing ice! I want a story set about the universe of pushing ice!!! it's my very first Reynold's book! And I love it!!!! LOL. SOrry for those excessive exclamation marks

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  9. More on Pushing Ice please! My favourite universe! I would love that...

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  10. I am an ancient fan who grew up with the big three, Clarke, Asimov and Heinlein, and their peers and some of their successors. It has been so long since I've read any decent new science fiction that I'd just about given up ever seeing any again. Now I'm in the middle of my first Reynolds book, Pushing Ice, and cannot say how happy I am to be reading such a fascinating novel where both the machines and the people are so well fleshed out, and looking at this large backlist of his titles for me to go on and read. What a great prospect.

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  11. will "Hideaway" (2000) and "Minla's Flowers" (2007) be available as Kindle editions (soon)?

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    1. All three of the Merlin stories are in the book Zima Blue, which is available on Kindle.

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  12. Yeah, what he said, want to read those two Merlin stories right now but they aren't on Kindle it seems. A Merlin novel as someone else suggested could be pretty cool though I would rather a book of collected short Merlin stories of novel length!

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    1. All three of the Merlin stories are in the book Zima Blue, which is available on Kindle.

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