Alastair Reynolds to do a Doctor Who Novel

This is certainly interesting news to me, Alastair Reynolds, one of my favorite authors is writing about a character I grew up with, Doctor Who, in a novel called Harvest of Time, an original science fiction novel featuring the Third Doctor, his companion Jo Grant, and arch-enemy The Master.

The Fourth and Fifth Doctors were always my favorites, and it was the fourth Doctor that introduced me to the series, with "The Talons of Weng Chiang". My favorite epsiodes, digging through my childhood memories include "The Ark in Space", "The Android Invasion", "The Seeds of Doom", "The Planet of Evil", "City of Death", "Logopolis", "Castrovalva", "Earth Shock" and "The Caves of Androzani", and from the recent series "The Girl in the Fireplace".

I think Reynold's visitation to 'Whoverse' will be the first Doctor Who novel I'll have read since early highschool. Looking forward to it.

The Strangest Planets

I've been very interested in the planets astronomers are detecting around other suns. What they are finding is so unexpected, and so different to what we have previously imagined possible.

But is it really that strange? Life seems to evolve and adapt to all kinds of conditions, so why can't planets.

There are Jupiter sized planets out there orbiting so close to their suns their surface temperatures are thousands of degrees. Worlds with extreme eliciptical orbits. Massive rocky planets three times and half a dozen times as massive as the Earth. Planets that are 12 billion years old (consider the Universe is only 13.7 billion years old). Planets that are covered in oceans many hundreds of kilometres thick. Planets, it seems, appear wherever they can survive, just like life.

I feel that strange planets are going to turn space opera on its head. Authors like Larry Niven and Alastair Reynolds are great at creating bizarre worlds, but planets are going to be even more extreme, I think, than what we've seen in the best space opera. It's going to be even more of a challenge to write in this genre now.

Check out this slide show of strange planets at Space.com to see just what it is that astronomers are detecting out there in the Big Black.

Influences: Chasm City

I’ve only been reading Alastair Reynolds recently but boy did he make an impression. One of the new wave British science fiction authors who write strong, believable space opera, Reynold’s Revelation Space series is stunning in its scope and imagination.

Chasm City was the first Reynolds novel I read and was the most visually impressive of everythign that I've read by him.

The story centres around two characters. The first is an ex-soldier turned security expert who finds himself on a strange high tech world recovering from the aftermath of a devastating alien plague. His memory is sketchy, but he knows he is chasing a man who wants to kill him to kill him first. The other story concerns a questionable leader of a fleet of slower-than-light starships racing to colonise a distant world, and the coup that results. Both characters are separated by both time and space, but their relationship is closer than anyone might suspect.

Reynolds is influenced by Larry Niven’s Known Space series and it shows in its grand scope and amazing ideas, but what Reynolds does so much better are his characters, his easy to read style and sense of pace. He even has transhumans or posthumans, highly evolved species of men and women who have transgressed the frailness of the human condition, and live almost immortal lives. However unlike many of his contemporaries, Reynold’s posthumans don’t lose their ‘humanness’ with their super abilities.

I also like that high tech is not available for everyone. For example his world of Sky’s Edge is reminiscent of a Latin American country stuck in a perpetual civil war, while his world of Yellowstone is like New Orleans after the cyclone, an amazing vibrant city struck down into squalor after a horrific external event. There are other high tech worlds out there, but they are keeping it to themselves. Unlike many science fiction writers, Reynold’s knows how to build believable political and cultural backdrops to his worlds.

Aliens feature in his stories and they are creepy, enigmatic and highly creative, often with bizarre Lovecraftian like characteristics.

Chasm City is not the only tale in the series, there is also the trilogy Revelation Space, Redemption Ark and Absolution Gap, short story collections Diamond Dog, Turquoise Days and Galactic North, and the stand-alone novel The Prefect. If you like space opera big, exciting and action packed, this is a great series to read.