Quotes by "Alastair Reynolds"

Cyphel knew exactly how he felt about her as well — it was there in her expression whenever they spoke that beguiling combination of amusement and haughtiness that she carried off so well. It was a look that expressed disdain at Campion’s guarded advances but also a kind of measured probationary respect as well. It was a look that said You dare to think that I will find you as interesting as you obviously find me Well perhaps in that very act of daring you become interesting to me if only fleetingly.

All data is stale. The photons reaching your eyes are stale. They tell you that you are looking at something real, but you have no information that the objects before you still exist. They may have vanished into oblivion the instant those photons took wing.

No act of knowledge acquisition is entirely without risk.

...' I want to make sense of the world, Doctor. I want to undo the screws, take off its elegant face, glimpse the glittering movement, poke around in the gears and then decide if it's broken or not. Then I want to know if there is anything we can do to put it back together again. There may not be, but at least we'd have the satisfaction of knowing.' ' We'd be satisfied by our own impotence?' ' We won't know until we try

I always say that keeping abreast of science should never be seen as a chore. It should be something you do naturally. I don't sit there reading 'New Scientist,' putting post-it notes next to ideas.

No idea should be discarded completely, but - as one might imagine - it does take a degree of ingenuity to find a new spin on something as hackneyed as the 'Adam and Eve' story. But if you think you've got the chops for it, there's no reason not to try.

I've been enthralled by deep vistas of space and time ever since watching George Pal's film of 'The Time Machine,' while an early encounter with Arthur C. Clarke's 'The City And The Stars' cemented my love for books with a scope spanning millions of years.

The idea of a computer winning the Nobel Prize for physics is not too unlikely, citing a computer as joint recipient. It's obviously not a huge leap to think of something similar happening in fiction.

My early memories of 'Who' are clouded by time and confused by repeats and reissues. I have no direct recollection of the first two Doctors and none at all of the first season of the Pertwee era. By the last two seasons of the Third Doctor, I was properly hooked.

I've never had much interest in spinoffery - the idea of writing in someone else's universe generally leaves me cold - but 'Doctor Who' is different. I've grown up with it. It's been part of my life since I was tiny, watching Jon Pertwee on a grainy black and white television in Cornwall and being terrified out of my mind.

I'm fascinated by steam engines and with Victorian engineering generally, and as a corollary to that, I'm fascinated by the idea of long-lived technologies.

From apparently superluminal radio sources in deep space, to the neutrinos that were supposed to be arriving ahead of schedule at the Grand Sasso experiment in Italy, every apparent exception to Einstein's ultimate speed law has turned out to be a phantom.

I would much rather we concentrated on the immediate, still-potent dangers, such as nuclear weapons, runaway climate change, and so on. Sort those out, then worry about Hal 9000.

When you're writing stuff that's already clotted with neologisms and trying to get across fairly abstruse concepts, you're already putting a heavy burden on the reader.

Most of the time, when I get an idea that hinges on some science 'thing,' it will have been because of something I read or encountered months or years earlier rather than in the last few days.

As a kid, I'd buy novels with these magnificent Chris Fosse covers which showed an enormous contraption hovering over a planet, and you'd always think 'Where's that going to come in?' And it never did! It was always slightly disappointing when the contents of a book never lived up to the cover.

Why would you need to expand beyond the solar system if you already have access to all the information you need, and you've essentially insulated yourself against a planetary apocalypse? Maybe that's enough.

I couldn't ever write a straight crime novel: there'd be an intrusion of weirdness at some point.

I'm not a morning person: I can't function until I've had a coffee - or several.

Don't keep rewriting and polishing something if it isn't setting the world on fire: start something new instead and consider the earlier story a learning experience.