Post-Worldcon, Cardiff Half-marathon update and a new novella.

 Just over a week ago I set off for Glasgow and the 2024 World Science Fiction Convention. This was only my second time in Glasgow - the other was for the 2005 Worldcon. It's a great, friendly city and my only regret was that I overcommitted myself with program events to the point where I didn't get to see any part of Glasgow besides the event venue and our hotel. My wife didn't have a con membership but we managed to catch up once or twice in the day in the "public" areas of the SEC, and then made time to have nice meals in the evening back near our hotel in the West End.

The convention seems to have been very well received by all concerned, especially after the difficulties of last year and the general culture-war vibe still hanging over Worldcons from the Puppy nonsense of a few years ago. Hopefully this is the way to go. The organisers of the 2024 event are to be praised for their transparency at all times.

I found time to catch up with a few old friends. Here's Peter F Hamilton and me in the hotel lobby, before heading out for food:

Where we met our writer pal, the wonderful and talented Justina Robson:

My wife and I also enjoyed hooking up with dear friends Gay and Joe Haldeman. I've been reading Joe's work since my mid-teens, when I first scored copies of Mindbridge and The Forever War, and the story notes he provided in his collections (such as "Infinite Dreams") went a long way to demystifying the whole business of "being a writer". Joe is the absolute antidote to those "don't meet your heroes" stories.

The con was very well-attended and this was reflected in generally full, or near-full, audiences for program items. Peter and I found this refreshing and commented to each other that we felt newly validated as writers. It can be a bit of a lonely, thankless profession at times, but walking into packed program rooms was the definite kick we both needed. Thanks to all who attended our events, and made them so enjoyable.

(The downside of this, unfortunately, is that Glasgow seems to have generated a bit of a Covid spike, but since I caught it back in July, I seem to have escaped unscathed.)

I also couldn't resist a picture of the Batman car:

I've no idea if this was THE Batman '66 car or just a replica, but it sure looked gorgeous, down to the classic Batman-style labelling on all the controls:

As hard as it might be to believe now, the original Batman TV series was amazingly exciting when it first appeared. Long after 1966 (probably more like 1976) my sister and I used to make sure we were home from school in time for the re-runs - or what, to us, felt like the original transmissions. I've a soft spot for the 1989 Keaton Batmobile (which I saw in the flesh at the Sydney motor show that year) but I still think the '66 version is pretty hard to beat. Remember: "Atomic batteries to power!" "Turbines to speed!". That's what we need more of now: cars with atomic batteries in them.

I didn't get any running done in Glasgow but I have been pushing on with my training for the Cardiff Half, for which I'm trying to raise a thousand pounds for Alzheimer's UK. You can read my latest update (I ran a dummy "half" yesterday) over on my Justgiving page. People have been very generous so far but with only 6 - 7 weeks to go, I want to keep pushing!

https://www.justgiving.com/page/alastair-reynolds-1713971449990

Just before heading off Glasgow I completed a new novella set in France in the distant future, entitled "The Dagger in Vichy", which I'm pleased to say has found a home and should be appearing next year. More news on that later. I know, what a tease! And now, back to novel work.

Ta,

Al R

Toumani Diabate (1965-2024)

 It's not been a good week or so, has it?

Together with a few friends, I had the pleasure of seeing and hearing the master of the kora on the Africa Express tour a decade or so back.

ps - thanks for the latest donations to my fundraising effort, much appreciated.

The Chills

 Saddened to hear about the passing of Martin Phillips of The Chills, one of the really great guitar bands to come out of NZ, or indeed anywhere. I saw them only once, in the mid-90s (I'd hazard a guess at 1995) in either The Melkweg or The Paradiso in Amsterdam. Brilliant, as you'd expect. Wish I still had the t-shirt.

RIP, Martin.

Oh, and while I'm here, I'm still looking for donations for my half-marathon in support of Alzheimer's UK!

https://www.justgiving.com/page/alastair-reynolds-1713971449990

Extra, extra

 I've posted another modest update over on my Just Giving page for the Cardiff Half Marathon:

https://www.justgiving.com/page/alastair-reynolds-1713971449990

All donations contributed so far have been very gratefully received, but I still hope to keep pushing.

An article in The Guardian this week talked about the positive consequences of "civic engagement", which can be as simple as joining a club.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/jul/23/join-or-die-documentary-review

This got me thinking about the surprising benefits of parkrun, which is the closest I get to any sort of organised sporting activity. Thanks to friendships formed at parkrun, I got to know some of the people involved in one of our community theatre groups. After initially volunteering to help shift scenery, I was eventually bumped up to three speaking parts in a musical, then (as mentioned in the previous post) a relatively substantial part in our recent production of Much Ado About Nothing. Following on from that, five of us were then able to offer our services as background artists for a forthcoming BBC film, "Mr Burton", featuring Toby Jones and Leslie Manville, which should be out next year. And here we are dressed up as 1950s theatre-goers!

From left to right: Gareth and Ella (who are part of our parkrun family), Katie-May, Liam, and (you guessed) me. It was a fun, if occasionally repetitive day, and we'll have to wait and see how much of our presence ends up on the screen. Rather interestingly, although there were only about 30 extras in total, we'll be digitally duplicated to fill a 600 seat theatre! This involved a time-consuming process of moving us around in blocks to fill every seat, going through the same actions each time, and with different camera angles.

This is the second time I've done extra work. The first time was in 1999 when my wife and I, bizarrely enough, ended up playing elements of an angry urban mob for a hostage/siege scenario being depicted as part of a recruiting film for the Royal Navy. Since the film was only ever shown at the RN centre in Portsmouth, I've never seen it.

I have to take a step back from all this exciting stuff now, though, to concentrate on writing. Other than the current novel-in-progress, I've been working on a long short story which is now nearing completion. More on that at some point, I hope.

Al R

Much Ado About Nothing

I'm part of a community theatre group based in South Wales. We're putting on Much Ado About Nothing on the evenings of July 11, 12 and 13 up at the lovely Dare Valley country park. Come along and see our friendly production! Although not in the picture above (I was away when we did the photo-shoot) I'll be playing the incompetent Dogberry, alongside Liam (sitting on the ground on the right) as Dogberry's put-upon sidekick Verges. We've all put a lot of work into our parts (even going up to London to see the RCT's brilliant production of Much Ado at The Globe) so it will be lovely if people come along. We'll be performing in the round, and weather permitting, outdoors.

Tickets are 12 pounds plus a 94 pence booking fee from the link below.

https://www.facebook.com/showcasesioegerdd/?locale=en_GB

https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/showcaseperformingarts

To the Stars and Back is out, and more

 Newcon Press's anthology in honour of Eric Brown, "To The Stars And Back", is out in the world and contains a very nice selection of stories. Here's an early review of the book:

https://ww.runalongtheshelves.net/blog/2024/6/1/to-the-stars-and-back-stories-in-honour-of-eric-brown-edited-by-ian-whates

All of the authors offered to waive their contributor fees, which I think indicates the high esteem Eric was held in by his friends and colleagues, and the desire to lend a little support to his wife and daughter.

Again, a link to Newcon Press:

http://newconpress.co.uk/

Another good cause, which I hope you won't mind me mentioning again, is my half-marathon run for Alzheimer's UK. I said I wouldn't go on about it too much, but we're in a new month now, and the donations so far have been very generous, so I feel it's worth pushing on with the fund drive. I mentioned my dear grandmother's affliction with Alzheimer's, and on that note I thought I'd reprint the introduction I wrote for Subterranean Press when they did my last anthology, Belladonna Nights, because it touches on my grandmother (Megan) and her link to my writing.

Introduction: Winter did come.

The early weeks of 1982 were significant in the UK, bringing some of the heaviest snows seen in a generation. People still talk about it, just as those with longer memories still talk about the winters of 1963 or 1947. Schools were closed and much of the country effectively paralysed. Through circumstances that I can’t now remember, my sister and I ended up marooned about twenty miles from home, staying with my maternal grandmother in the Welsh seaside town of Barry, my original birthplace. I was fifteen; my sister a year and a bit younger.

It wasn’t such a bad place to be marooned. Being off school was certainly no hardship. Despite the bitter cold, our grandmother’s house was always warm and cosy. Nanna plied us with tea and biscuits and kept us clean and well-fed. There were Reader’s Digest magazines to keep us occupied, and although there were only three channels on the television, there was usually something worth watching, even if it was only the snooker.

For me, importantly, there was a near limitless supply of lined paper and pens. Nanna had the most wonderful wooden bureau, stocked with stationery supplies – heaven for a quiet, bookish boy with a love of writing and drawing.

So I wrote a short story.

This wasn’t the first story I had written, because prior to then there had been any number of school exercises. But it was a different thing altogether to sit down and write a story that wasn’t written at someone else’s behest; a story that existed only because I felt the need to express something, and which could be as long and digressive – or as short and to the point - as it needed to be.

By that time, I was starting to have an inkling that I wanted to write science fiction at a professional level. And although I didn’t yet understand the mechanics of publication, I realised that for many writers, short stories were a part of the process.

Although the story I wrote was in no sense publishable, it was an important step on the road to taking my craft more seriously. By the end of the year I was teaching myself to type, and I had begun, in a very tentative way, to research the magazine market. Mostly that meant reading the story notes in paperback collections and learning that there were magazines with names like Analog and Asimov’s, which is where these stories had often appeared. Actually obtaining these magazines was going to take a bit more work – quite a bit more, as it happened -  but at least I knew that they existed.

Over the next three or four years I kept writing short stories, still in long-hand for the most part, because I was too slow to type efficiently, but gradually the latter winning out. By the mid eighties I still hadn’t seen a single copy of Analog or Asimov’s, or any of the American magazines I had been reading about. They were exotic creatures of far shores, never venturing into the bookstalls and libraries of South Wales. By lucky chance, though, I became aware of Interzone, which at the time was really the only British science fiction magazine of any standing. And so I concentrated my efforts on submitting my stories to that magazine, and really only that one.

Interzone took a chance on a story of mine in 1989, although it wasn’t published until the following year. My first piece was a near-future, Earth-bound story involving Inuit communities and strange messages sent across time. My second piece, published not long after, took place on a plague-ridden starship travelling between alien solar systems. My third piece for Interzone was another Earth-bound story, this time about sentient weapon systems in the aftermath of a nuclear war. I’d go onto publish one or two more Earth-centric stories before returning to a space-themed setting.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but that early template of switching between the near and distant future, between the local and the distant, hasn’t served me too badly across the ensuing thirty years, as I hope this collection demonstrates. The bulk of the work here stems from the last decade, but my abiding concerns – and indeed my methods - are much the same as they were at the start of my career. You’ll find plenty of starships and far-off worlds in these pieces, as well as sentient machines and alien plagues. But there are also no small amount of stories set much closer to home, and one or two that inhabit in almost contemporaneous versions of the present day. Although my novels have tended to be set in remote or unrecognisably transformed solar systems, centuries or even millions of years from now, I can’t say that I prefer one mode over the other. What I’d chafe at would be forced into doing only one type of thing.

I’ve enjoyed revisiting these pieces – it’s surprising how quickly even a new-ish story stops being fresh in the mind – and I hope that readers will find something to enjoy as well. While the writing of novels, coming as it does with the necessary engagement with the commercial side of publishing, can at times bring stresses as well as joys, I’ve very rarely found writing short fiction to be anything other than a delight. Certainly, one gets a repeated buzz from finishing things, far more frequently than with novels. And the turnaround from completion to publication is often quicker, meaning that stories can feel like bulletins, rather than distant reports from one or two years ago. I have had great fortune to be able to sell these pieces, and I’m indebted to the editors and anthologists who took a chance on them. Even more so, though, I’m indebted to my Nanna and the cold winter of 1982.

Thank you for reading, and if you're encouraged to drop something into the pot, my fundraising page (along with updates on my running) is below:

https://www.justgiving.com/page/alastair-reynolds-1713971449990

Cheers and best wishes,

Al

Brum Group and Cardiff Half Marathon fundraiser

 A couple of updates - I was extremely flattered to be asked to take on the role of Honorary President of the Birmingham SF Group, following the passing of Chris Priest. I've had a warm association with the Brum Group since my first time as a published novelist. A talk for the group was the first bit of public promotion I did for Revelation Space, back in early 2000, and although I was extremely nervous about the whole thing, I was made to feel very welcome. I'd done plenty of public speaking as a scientist, none of which fazed me, but to talk about myself, as a writer, felt like very unfamiliar territory. I've got a little more used to it since then, thanks in no small part to the other events I've done in and around Birmingham, not just in direct connection with the group, but including signings at Andromeda Books, attendance at various Novacons and last year's Fantasycon, where there was much overlap of friendly faces and the same relaxed, welcoming spirit that I felt for the first time in 2000. Of course one would much prefer that Chris Priest was still in the role of Honorary President (and it was kind of CP to listen in on zoom during my last visit to the group, back in 2023) but I will do my best to (partially) fill the great man's shoes.

In other news: although it's not until October, I thought I'd get the ball rolling on a fundraising initiative for Alzheimer's UK. I'm participating in the Cardiff Half Marathon and hoping to raise as much money as possible for this deserving cause. I know, of course, that many of you offered generous support when my wife and I did the Cardiff Memory Walk for the same charity. If anyone feels they can dig in again, no matter how small the amount, it will be greatly appreciated. If you can't - no worries!

https://www.justgiving.com/page/alastair-reynolds-1713971449990

I won't keep banging on about this, but I will post a small reminder about once a month between now and October. And if you feel like sharing a link to this blog or the fundraising page on whatever platform you use, that would be very kind.

Many thanks,

Al R