For questions about the British author "Alastair Reynolds" specialising in dark hard science fiction and space opera. Five of his novels and several of his short stories take place within a consistent future universe, known as the "Revelation Space" universe. For questions about these see the [revelation-space] tag. Only use for questions about the author himself.
Alastair Reynolds (born 1966) is a British science fiction author. He specialises in dark hard science fiction and space opera. He spent his early years in Cornwall and Wales before university in Newcastle and St Andrews. In 1991, he moved to Noordwijk in the Netherlands where he met his wife whilst working for the European Space Research and Technology Centre, part of the European Space Agency, until 2004 when he left to pursue writing full-time. He returned to Wales in 2008 and lives near Cardiff.
Five of his novels and several of his short stories (all published between 2000 and 2007) take place within one consistent future universe, usually now called the Revelation Space universe. Although most characters appear in more than one novel, the works set within this future timeline rarely have the same protagonists twice. This series includes five novels, two novellas, and eight short stories set over a span of several centuries, spanning approximately 2200 to 40 000, although the novels are all set between 2427 and 2727. In this universe, extraterrestrial sentience exists but is elusive, interstellar travel is primarily near-light-speed (FTL travel is possible, but dangerous) and Reynolds provides an explanation for Fermi's paradox.
Reynolds then wrote four standalone novels away from the Revelation Space universe. Century Rain (2004) takes place in a different future universe with different rules, such as faster-than-light travel being possible through a system of portals similar to wormholes.
Pushing Ice (2005) is also a standalone story, with characters from much less distant in the future than in any of his other novels, set into a framework storyline that extends much further into the future of humanity than any of his previous novels, with another interpretation of the Fermi paradox. House of Suns (2009) is a standalone novel Reynolds described as "six million years in the future, starfaring clones, tensions between human and robot metacivilisations, King Crimson jokes." Terminal World (2010) was described by Reynolds described as "a kind of steampunk-tinged planetary romance, set in the distant future".
As of early 2012, Reynolds's current project is Poseidon's Children, a hard SF trilogy dealing with the expansion of the human species into the solar system and beyond, and the emergence of Africa as a spacefaring, technological super-state several centuries down the line over the next 11,000 years. The first book is titled Blue Remembered Earth and was published in January 2012.
Reynolds's fiction has received three awards and several other nominations. His second novel Chasm City won the 2001 British Science Fiction Award for Best Novel. Reynolds has been nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award three times; in 2010, he won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History for his short story "The Fixation". His novella Troika made the shortlist for the 2011 Hugo Awards.
