Quotes from Alastair Reynolds

I'm still bothered by the threat of nuclear war.

The one thing that really terrifies me is we're going to get a signal from space that clears it all up: 'OK, this is how the universe works, guys.'

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.

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.

Science fiction can be very relevant, could be good literature.

To be remembered at all is an achievement of sorts.

For me, the distant future and far-off galaxies is where it's at. That's where my imagination can really come out to play.

I was really impressed by '2312.'

As a science fiction writer, it's hard to think of a more stirring theme than the origin and ultimate destiny of life in the universe.

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

'Doctor Who' is part of my science fictional DNA. You could take it out of me, and I'd probably still have ended up being a writer, but almost certainly not the same one.

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.

When I was writing 'House Of Suns,' there were a few writers I had in mind as role models, the main being Gene Wolfe.

I don't know why, but American sci-fi writers seem to focus on the near-future, which has given us Brits a clear run at the most fascinating.

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.

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.

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.

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

Sitting here at the beginning of the 21st century, we're only 200 years into the industrial revolution. We don't have an enormous dataset to draw on, so whatever shaped curve we're on, we're only at the beginning of it.

I've always been skeptical of the idea that sentience is going to be an exclusively human attribute.

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!

If there's a story I absolutely cannot tell without faster-than-light travel, then I am quite prepared to accept it - even though I don't personally believe it is possible.

Like everyone else, I read newspapers and 'New Scientist' and try to put my finger on the trends which we can just see emerging now that are accelerating and might take off.

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.