Spanning more than fifteen years, the book also collects more recent stories like environmental SF tale “The Water Thief”, powerful and moving YA “The Old Man and the Martian Sea” and the brilliant “In Babelsberg”.īeyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds has something for every reader of science fiction, and easily meets the challenge of delivering stories that are the hardest of hard science fiction and great entertainment. The very best of his more than sixty published short stories are gathered in Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds, a sweeping 250,000 word career retrospective which features the very best stories from the ‘Revelation Space’ universe like “Great Wall of Mars”, “Weather”, “Diamond Dogs”, and “The Last Log of the Lachrymosa” alongside thrilling hard science fiction stories like Hugo Award nominee “Troika”, “Thousandth Night”, and “The Star Surgeon’s Apprentice”. His short stories have been nominated for the Hugo, British Fantasy, British Science Fiction, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial, Locus, Italia, Seiun, and Sidewise Awards, and have won the Seiun and Sidewise Awards. With a career stretching back more than 25 years and across fourteen novels, including the classic ‘Revelation Space’ series, the bestselling ‘Poseidon’s Children’ series, Century Rain, Pushing Ice, and most recently The Medusa Chronicles (with Stephen Baxter), Reynolds has established himself as one of the best and most beloved writers of hard science fiction and space opera working today.Ī brilliant novelist, he has also been recognized as one of our best writers of short fiction. We live surrounded by hills, woods and wildlife, and not too much excitement.The Guardian called Alastair Reynolds’ work “a turbulent, wildly entertaining ride” and The Times acclaimed him as “the mastersinger of space opera”.

I met my wife in the Netherlands through a mutual interest in climbing and we married back in Wales. In my spare time I am a very keen runner, and I also enjoying hill-walking, birdwatching, horse-riding, guitar and model-making.

I moved to the Netherlands to continue my science career and stayed there for a very long time, before eventually returning to Wales. I was born in Wales, but raised in Cornwall, and then spent time in the north of England and Scotland.

Some of my books and stories are set in a consistent future named after Revelation Space, the first novel, but I've done a lot of other things as well and I like to keep things fresh between books. I write about a novel a year and try to write a few short stories as well. I started off publishing short stories in the British SF magazine Interzone in the early 90s, then eventually branched into novels. Greta's true form makes an appearance twice in the simulation: through a glass bottle as she sits with him in the bar, and as a shadow against a wall as she tells him that he's in a simulation. I'm Al, I used to be a space scientist, and now I'm a writer, although for a time the two careers ran in parallel. Beyond the Aquila Rift is based on the short story of the same name written by Alastair Reynolds, who also wrote the original story for Zima Blue.

Beyond the aquila rift original story