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THE LAST LOG OF THE LACHRIMOSA

I KEEP TELLING people that I’m not done with the Revelation Space universe, but in the absence of new novels, the only way to keep delivering on that promise is to write new short stories. Before “Last Log”, the previous one had been “Monkey Suit”, from 2009, so it was high time to produce something new. The story had a long, difficult gestation, taking several years to get straight. I think people sometimes imagine that I’m deliberately holding back from doing more Revelation Space stories, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The problem is that they’re quite hard to write. Although the Revelation Space universe is huge, spanning thousands of years and hundreds of worlds and cultures, the narrative space, at least from where I’m seated, is already pretty congested. The stories also need to have some functional independence from each other. You have to figure that at least one reader won’t have read anything else by you before, so you can’t overload on backstory and obscure references to other events in the universe.

THE WATER THIEF

ARC, A NEW publishing venture launched under the wing of New Scientist, invited me to submit a short story with a relatively near-future setting. At the time I was deep in the early stages of the Poseidon’s Children sequence of novels, and it seemed natural to dig a little earlier into that future history and take a look at events on Earth in the middle decades of the twenty-first century. I set my story in a kind of transit camp where migrant workers—forced to flee by climate change and resource shortages—earn a crust using cheap but ubiquitous telepresence technology doing menial chores elsewhere on the planet—or in this case, on the Moon. It’s actually a pretty pure example of “Mundane SF”, in that nothing that happens in the story requires any science or technology not already on the drawing boards, if not already with us.

THE OLD MAN AND THE MARTIAN SEA

AFTER THE SUCCESS of The Starry Rift, Jonathan Strahan began casting the net out for young adult stories set on future iterations of Mars. This was my attempt, and although the story was straightforward enough—by which I mean that it didn’t throw me any particular curves during the writing—it was executed under incredibly difficult circumstances. My father had been diagnosed with terminal cancer in the late summer of 2009, and was not expected to survive much longer than spring of the following year. My father was out of hospital and receiving palliative care at his home, and I’d drive down to visit him as often as possible. On one of those trips, I brought this story to work on during a quiet few hours in the afternoon. I remember my father being very happy when I told him that I’d finished a piece of fiction—I think it cheered him up to have some “normal” activity going on around him at such an utterly surreal time. As it was, my father died only a few weeks after his diagnosis, and this was the last piece of fiction I produced until well into the following year. Up to a point, writing can be a release from the pressures of life, but sooner or later—in my experience, at least—life will trump the ability to write.

Here are some of the notes that preceded this piece:

Very distant future on Mars. Lots of exotic weirdness, radical technologies, off-hand strangeness. Huge sense of historic density. Layers of previous civilisations and settlements. Digging through the ruins of the past. Young adult protagonist. Terraforming as good or bad thing. Mars as the epicenter of human civilisation, Earth a backwater. Interstellar travellers returning after centuries away. A dare that goes wrong. Martian lineman. War veterans. Mars being moved into a different orbit, its gravity altered.

A history lesson. Field trip that goes wrong, bored kids and teacher run into trouble when they activate some ancient, buried technology. What comes to their rescue?

Autonomous construction/terraforming machines left over from the past. Huge enigmatic machines that prowl the outskirts of Mars, left mainly to their own devices.

Active, resourceful protagonist.

Stowaway on a robot cargo dirigible that runs into trouble.

In the background details of this story, incidentally you can see in germinal form some of the ideas I later fleshed out in the Poseidon’s Wake sequence. Given what becomes of Mars in those books, though, I think we can pretty easily rule out them sharing the same universe as this piece.

IN BABELSBERG

EVEN SPACE PROBES have Twitter accounts now (if you’re reading this more than six months in the future, incidentally, please delete “Twitter” and substitute whatever social media tool is the New Thing) and it occurred to me that it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch for space probes to start handling their own PR, fielding questions, doing the chat show circuit and so on. It’s a frivolous enough idea, but it also plays into one of my slightly more serious hobbyhorses: the notion that space exploration won’t belong to robots or people exclusively, as the debate is usually framed, but to some as-yet-undreamt-of hybrid of the two.

Also by Alastair Reynolds from Gollancz:

Novels

Revelation Space

Redemption Ark

Absolution Gap

Chasm City

Century Rain

Pushing Ice

The Prefect

House of Suns

Terminal World

Blue Remembered Earth

On the Steel Breeze

Poseidon’s Wake

The Medusa Chronicles (with Stephen Baxter)

Short Story Collections:

Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days

Galactic North

Zima Blue

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Gollancz

an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

An Hachette UK Company

This eBook first published in 2016 by Gollancz.

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