Alastair Reynolds Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von Alastair Reynolds:

When I was a kid, I was reliably informed that we'd have gone to Mars by 1985, and of course it's 2012, and we're still really no closer to a human expedition to Mars, but that shouldn't detract from the amazing achievements that are being done on a day-to-day basis by robotic envoys.

When I was a kid, I was reliably informed that we'd have gone to Mars by 1985, and of course it's 2012, and we're still really no closer to a human expedition to Mars, but that shouldn't detract from the amazing achievements that are being done on a day-to-day basis by robotic envoys.

Alastair Reynolds

One of the big breakthroughs I had as a writer was when I stopped agonising over every word.

Alastair Reynolds

Science fiction writers aren't short of ideas. You can read a book, and it sets off a chain of thought processes, so it becomes a response to other people's books.

Alastair Reynolds

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.

Alastair Reynolds

In some respects, big ideas can be a bit too big for a short story - especially if you've only got a couple of thousand words to play with, and you need room for other stuff, like character, description.

Alastair Reynolds

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.

Alastair Reynolds

I watched 'Who' with a mixture of affection and exasperation through the eighties, always ready to cheer on the Doctor but seldom feeling that the series was playing to its strengths. Some of the adventures, revisited on DVD, turn out to be better than I remembered - others just as infuriating.

Alastair Reynolds

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.

Alastair Reynolds

There is so little SF drawn from modern scientific thinking, in any discipline, that I'm much more cheered by the successes than the failures, most of which are forgivable.

Alastair Reynolds

I had an artistic streak and was good at painting and drawing and also very good at English, but I did want to be a scientist. The education system means you have to choose physics or Shakespeare. It can't be both.

Alastair Reynolds

I've always been attracted to Pertwee's portrayal of the Doctor as dashing man-of-science, charming, sceptical, and rational.

Alastair Reynolds

In crime, I like Ian Rankin and James Lee Burke. As for historical books, I enjoy Bernard Cornwell, Patrick O'Brien, and C. S. Forester - anything with battleships!

Alastair Reynolds

I couldn't think of anything more pointless than reading a piece of fiction written by a robot.

Alastair Reynolds

We live in a science fictional world with things like cloning and face transplants, and things seem to be getting stranger and stranger.

Alastair Reynolds

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.

Alastair Reynolds

I'm always a little bit cautious around invented terminology because so much science fiction is off-putting to the uninitiated. You open up the first page, and it's full of all these made-up words.

Alastair Reynolds

In the 'Revelation Space' books, the spaceships are a bit old and rusty, and things go wrong, and they don't work quite how they're meant to. And people asked why I did it this way, and groping around for an explanation, I said that I grew up in Barry, this post-industrial sea town full of rusting infrastructure.

Alastair Reynolds

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.

Alastair Reynolds

The first time I read a crime novel - I think it may have been an Elmore Leonard book - it took some time for me to realise how the genre worked. There were about 20 characters on the first page, and I wasn't used to this. I started to enjoy it when I saw that was how crime books worked.

Alastair Reynolds

I didn't have a huge amount of security when I was a scientist from one contract to another. You're always thinking, 'Am I going to have a job this time next year?'

Alastair Reynolds

I am playing in a playground that's already been played in. I am always aware that a lot of the furniture in science fiction is second hand.

Alastair Reynolds

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.

Alastair Reynolds

I've always had ideas for more books than I can write.

Alastair Reynolds

To be remembered at all is an achievement of sorts.

Alastair Reynolds

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.

Alastair Reynolds

I just start writing, and in the process, one hopefully comes up with ideas and solutions and explores all the little nooks and crannies.

Alastair Reynolds

One of the dangers of science fiction, particularly bad science fiction, is that you have these scenes where the characters turn to a blackboard and start explaining how this faster-than-light drive works, or something like that. We never really have those conversations in real life. That's not part of the way we interact as human beings.

Alastair Reynolds

I've always loved far future SF, so it was more or less a given that I would one day want to write in that form.

Alastair Reynolds

I think I set myself on a course to become a scientist around about the time that Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos' series was on television, and there really was no going back for me at that point, and then I went on to study space science and then get my Ph.D., then go aboard and work in the European Space Agency.

Alastair Reynolds

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.

Alastair Reynolds

As an SF writer, you've got the infinite toolkit of the writer at your disposal.

Alastair Reynolds

Daleks scared the hell out of me, to the point where I wouldn't go round to another boy's house because he had Dalek wallpaper in his bedroom.

Alastair Reynolds

What works for me is simply to read a lot of stuff throughout the year - not with a particular story or theme in mind, but just because you never know what might be useful or interesting in the long run. I much prefer to just absorb a lot of stuff and let the old unconscious chew down on it over time.

Alastair Reynolds

I used to be a strong believer that we would eventually colonize the solar system the way it's been done in science fiction many, many times: bases on the moon, Mars colonized, move out to the outer planets, then we go to the next solar system and build a colony there. I don't know now - I'm not as convinced that's the way it's going to pan out.

Alastair Reynolds

I'm a genre writer - I chose to be one, I ended up one, I still am one, and I'm not writing transgressive, genre-blurring fiction. I write 'core SF' - it may occasionally incorporate horror or noir tropes, but it's not pretending to be anything other than what it is.

Alastair Reynolds

I had - and continued to have - great fun exploring the Revelation Space universe, but it was always clear to me that I wanted to write other kinds of books, even within what might be termed the fairly narrow overlapping genre categories of hard SF and space opera.

Alastair Reynolds