Introduction to Alastair Reynolds's Zima Blue

Before I tell you about Al Reynolds and the stories collected here, I need to say something about the New Space Opera. That's doesn't mean that I'm going to attempt to describe Al's role in the resurgence of space opera, or define his place within the group of British science fiction writers who are associated in one way or another with the New Space Opera. For one thing, if you asked talents as diverse as, say, Iain M. Banks, Stephen Baxter, Peter F. Hamilton, M. John Harrison, Ian McDonald, Ken MacLeod, Justina Robson and Charles Stross why they're writing the stuff, you'd get a different answer from each person. For another, there are plenty of American writers who, like the Brits, have been engaged in reinventing and refurbishing space opera's cherished but almost fatally tarnished and rusted tropes. In short, the New Space Opera is more of a confluence than a movement, a wide range of writers working on a broad spectrum of themes without the benefits of either a prophet or a manifesto.

But while individual writers have their own interests and reasons for reworking space opera, they're all building their various fictions on a common foundation. Like the old space opera of E.E. ‘Doc' Smith, Edmund Hamilton and a host of unsung pulp writers, the New Space Opera sets its stories against vast backdrops of both time and space, and its characters are often engaged in superhuman efforts on which the fate of humanity is hung. But the new stuff is also closely engaged with hard science (from quantum physics and cosmology to evolutionary biology, bioengineering and cybernetics) and asks tough questions (who are we? why are we here? where are we going?) about humanity's place in a hostile universe. Its stories are informed by a sense of deep and often secret histories imperfectly understood and closely associated with cosmological mysteries, and are played out against a culturally rich patchwork of governments, economies, alliances and alien species rather than the monolithic empires of old.

Al Reynolds's first four novels, Revelation Space, Chasm City, Redemption Ark and Absolution Gap, are classic New Space Opera, set in a future history in which humanity is attempting to find its place in a galaxy littered with the artifacts of ancient civilisations and patrolled by alien killing machines, the Inhibitors. And although none of the stories in this collection are part of the ‘Inhibitor' series, they do share many of its themes, concerns and tropes, and their protagonists, as in those four novels, are most often ordinary working stiffs caught up in huge events whose ramifications they can barely glimpse but must unriddle in order to survive, and whose cynical attitudes and side-of-the-mouth quips tinge their narratives with a noir hue. Spirey, in ‘Spirey and the Queen', for instance, can't resist making a characteristically caustic remark with what might be his last breath while fighting to gain control of a spaceship that's the only way of escaping a seemingly insignificant splinter of ice whose secret chambers are being riddled with kinetic weapons fired by what was once his own side, in a war for control of the resources of a protoplanetary disc. Crammed with eye-kicks, pell-mell action, and big ideas about what it means to be human and the future and nature of intelligent life, it's a story that could easily stand as the taxonomic type specimen of the New Space Opera.

Although, as Brian Aldiss once remarked, you no more need to be a scientist to write science fiction than you need to be a ghost to write ghost stories, Al Reynolds has professional qualifications in Thinking Big. Until only a little while ago, he was an astrophysicist working for the European Space Agency, with a B.Sc and Ph.D in astronomy. As in the rest of his fiction, Al brings to the stories in this collection a scientific rigour that firmly connects his speculations to the present -- to theories and ideas current in the happening scientific world. One of the reasons why his stories are so large in scope, and span so much time, is that he refuses to refute Einstein. His characters travel between planets and stars the hard way. Even when he introduces corridors where the laws of space-time have been warped to allow faster-than-light travel, transit is dangerous and difficult; and those dangers and difficulties are an integral part of the plot of two related stories, ‘Merlin's Gun' and ‘Hideaway', where with typical sleight of hand, a vast alien engineering project turns out to be something other than the weapon its protagonists were seeking. This same sense of cosmic agape (and goofy riffs on a certain singer with a penchant for big boots and even bigger spectacles) informs the redemptive arc of his last-man-alive story, ‘Understanding Space and Time'; in ‘Beyond the Aquila Rift', accidental exile isn't something you can get around by reversing the polarity of the neutrino generator; and in ‘Angels of Ashes', human survival is revealed to be a matter of quantum probability rather than the predestiny or special pleading that's typical of old space opera. Like all the best New Space Opera writers, Al loves the tropes and spectacular disjunctions between human and cosmic scales of the old stuff, but it's a tough love that takes no prisoners.

Other stories explore the way in which time affects personality, and how personality and consciousness is defined by memory. There's the Rashomon-like riddle of the true history of the first Mars landing in ‘The Real Story'; the slow transformation of a killing machine and the hope implied by its link with a young girl in ‘Enola' (in which that name is redeemed from its association with Hiroshima); and the unriddling of the significance of a particular shade of blue to the work of the titular artist in the moving and wonderfully observed ‘Zima Blue'. ‘Signal to Noise', new to this collection, explores the differences between our memories of those we love and the actual people via a novel twist on travel between alternate worlds, and those of you who have splashed out for the limited edition will find that ‘Digital to Analogue' spices a conspiracy theory story about a kind of viral meme that entrains human consciousness with vivid speculation about hive minds.

‘Digital to Analogue' was published in In Dreams, an anthology I edited with Kim Newman way back in the early 1990s. (Remember the 1990s? A Bush in the White House, a war in the Middle East, and a Conservative government in the United Kingdom . . . how things have changed.) Kim and I put out a general call that netted great stories from new writers Cliff Burns, Peter F. Hamilton, Jonathan Lethem and Lukas Jaeger, and Steve Rasnic Temm, but like all anthology editors, we also nagged writers we knew and trusted to produce something suitably wonderful. Al Reynolds was on my list because we'd briefly overlapped at St Andrews University, on the east coast of Scotland. I'd just started work as a lecturer in Botany; Al was finishing work on his Ph.D. Our friendship began when he phoned me out of the blue one night; every couple of weeks he'd slog up a long steep hill in all kinds of Scottish weather, and we'd spend a pleasant evening talking about science fiction and the business of writing and publishing in my village pub.

I don't want to give the impression that I was Al's Svengali. Far from it. He'd already sold a couple of stories by then, and it was clear that his modest, self-effacing manner was the Clark Kent disguise of an ambitious writer who had a boundless enthusiasm for the science fiction and crime genres and was keen to push at his limits and develop new ways of telling stories. As it still is.

Like me, Al had a long apprenticeship writing novels and stories dating back to his early teens. Unlike me, he'd managed to sustain his fiction writing while engaged in the long hard slog towards winning his Ph.D. And after spending several days reading and re-reading the stories collected here, I'm reminded all over again just how much work Al puts into his fiction. The density of ideas is impressive enough, but the stories themselves are also tough-minded and well-wrought, and never seem to strain to achieve their twists and payoffs -- a sign both of native talent and of the hard work that goes into disguising the hard work of creating well-rounded stories about unusual situations inhabited by believable and sympathetic characters.

They also demonstrate, like his last two novels, Century Rain (an alternate history that turns out to be something else), and Pushing Ice (an adroit first contact story), that Al Reynolds is definitely no one-note writer. In short, they show exactly why I asked him for a contribution to In Dreams, why his story passed the stiff test of Kim Newman's scrutiny with flying colours, and why, 15 years after we first met, he's still riding at the very cutting edge of science fiction.

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Index