Eversion

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The nitty-gritty: A mind-bending mystery through time and space, Eversiontakes readers on a dangerous journey of discovery. The novel starts on a tall ship in the early 1800s in waters in the Arctic, then jumps to a paddle-steamer near the Antarctic, then a dirigible over Antarctica, and eventually concludes in the future on a submarine-like explorer under the ice of Europa, the Jupiter moon. I don’t want to draw exact correlations, but I didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge. I had a normal British education. And so I could identify with the way this guy might feel at times—that he doesn’t have the right mannerisms to fit in at the dinner parties that the captain holds. He’s always, always slightly awkward, doesn’t quite know the right thing to say. Once I started writing the book and gravitating to the idea that he was going to be the main character, I really enjoyed doing his bits and particularly his interactions with the other crew members. Sad Kapteyn" – Originally published online by the School of Physics and Astronomy, Queen Mary University of London [38] The star of this speculative satire is Simone. He is a fashionite, a rarefied type of super influencer whose every whim is lavishly catered for and documented by magazines read only by fashionites. For example, during a brief hospitalisation, he spies a regular proletarian gown among the haute couture medical gowns available to him. He complains and the item is summarily burned.

Soirée" – Originally published in Celebration: Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the British Science Fiction Association (March 2008), Ian Whates, ed..Providence" – originally published in 2001: An Odyssey in Words, Newcon Press (March 2018), Ian Whates and Tom Hunter eds. Alastair Reynolds on Trying to Encompass the Entire History of Science Fiction in One Novel". 4 November 2022. From the master of the space opera, Alastair Reynolds, comes a dark, mind-bending SF adventure spread across time and space. Things To Do In Deimos When You're Dead" - Published in Asimov's Science Fiction (September/October 2022)

Alas, Reynolds finally drops the mask and allows Silas (and by extension, the reader) to see “reality,” I as let down. I thought the twist regarding Silas’s nature to be somewhat boring. It wasn’t predictable per se, at least not for me, but I was hoping for something … deeper, I guess? The same holds true for the nature of the Edifice and its antagonistic qualities. The second half of the novel is weaker, for there is much less danger for our protagonists. It becomes a kind of journey of exposition and self-discovery—and that has merit, I would agree, but it doesn’t hold interest as much as the tension of the first half did for me.Once a physicist: Alastair Reynolds". www.iop.org. Archived from the original on 26 August 2019 . Retrieved 26 August 2019. Before that, I completed the last two novels in the Revenger sequence about the Ness sisters, SHADOW Alastair Reynolds: I was on a trip down the Wikipedia rabbit hole one night, noodling around following links and I found an article about something called sphere eversion. I was kind of aware that there’s some interesting mathematics about things you can do with spheres, but this one caught my eye. The problem is, if you have a sphere, can you turn it inside out? And the answer is yes, you can in a specialized mathematical way that doesn’t map onto what we think of turning things inside out, so it is not the same as turning a football inside out. Ascension Day" – Originally published in Voices from the Past (May 2011), reprinted in The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection (2012, ISBN 978-1-250-00354-6), Gardner Dozois, ed. YOUR autobiographical memory can’t be trusted, and science has determined that this isn’t a bug, but a feature. The remembered stories from which we braid our identity bend and swerve to serve the narrative needs of our circumstances because our minds happily trade veracity for coherence and narrative. This strange space between recollection and construction is explored in two mesmerising books out this month.

Spheres have two surfaces – an inside and an outside. A sphere eversion turns it inside-out and reverses the two surfaces. Contrary to intuition, it is possible to do this without cutting or tearing or creasing the sphere’s surface. Cool! Yeah, but, well, it isn’t what Alastair Reynolds’ new science fiction novel is actually about. Alastair Reynolds is a former research astronomer with the European Space Agency, and now prolific hard-sf/space opera writer, best known for his Revelation Space novels and stories, almost all of which I have previously read. Eversion is a stand-alone novel, and not set in the Revelation Space universe. Much of the fun of these books comes from the construction of a far, far-future space-opera... the mapping of Age of Sail tropes onto space travel is just the start... Nevertheless, at the centre of this baroque masquerade party resides a sober consideration of what it might mean to go off adventuring, what it might cost.The Six Directions of Space", ISBN 978-1596061842 – Originally published in Galactic Empires (September 2007 [36]), Gardner Dozois, ed. The Locus Index to SF Awards: 2008 Seiun Awards". Locusmag.com. Archived from the original on 26 May 2013 . Retrieved 10 June 2013. Digital to Analogue" – Originally published in In Dreams (1992), Paul McAuley and Kim Newman, eds.., Limited Edition I am surprised that this book hasn‘t been shelved as horror. I found it quite claustrophobic and not a little creepy. It has been tagged as Space Opera though, which I don‘t think applies. Gothic steampunk time-travel space-exploration mystery?

I will say, though, that this is not a typical big Reynolds story. It carries a different vibe from the majority of his work I’ve read. It matches his more character focused novellas in scope, delivering on human moments with a hefty side helping of science fiction “ideas.” So while I was a little disappointed that he didn’t go harder in the paint with his bread and butter, I was more than satisfied by the particular exploration offered here. Death's Door" – originally published in Infinity's End, Solaris Press (July 2018), Jonathan Strahan ed. The story starts with a physician Doctor Silas Coade on a ship Demeter getting a new patient – one of the ship’s crew got hit in the head and is now convulsing – so the good doctor has to do a trepanation to decrease pressure. A group of other people visits Coade, quite a strange bunch, from Master Topolsky, who organized the expedition (and claims friendship of both Peter I and Catherine II, setting the time period to the middle of the 18th century) to Milady Ada Cossile, who upon witnessing the abovementioned operation, gives a lecture on different roots for words trepanation and trephination (which aren’t etymologically related). Moreover, readers find out that Coade writes a novel, a kind of proto-SF, with such impossible marvels as “Ships that sail by steam, cannons that fire volleys without being reloaded, and paintings that compose themselves by light alone".Minla's Flowers" – Originally published in The New Space Opera (2007, ISBN 978-0-06-084675-6), Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan, eds. Eversion is a delightful book. Reynolds’ ability to capture the horror that Silas finds himself in through increasingly imaginative scenarios creates an odd sense of wonder. I felt compelled to soldier on alongside Silas, and almost finished the whole book in one sitting. The various settings all have slight changes that make each one feel slightly more thought out, a tad more detail here and there. In particular, the drugs that Silas partakes in change with the times and Reynolds keeps pushing the bar in funny ways. Each iteration also reveals something even more off about Silas’ predicament, making the mystery tantalizing. THE MEDUSA CHRONICLES (2016): with Stephen Baxter. Steve and I hatched an idea to write a sequel to Arthur C Clarke’s seminal short story “A Meeting with Medusa” and with the kind permission of the Clarke estate we were able to do so. Our novel takes the character Howard Falcon and catapults him across centuries of tension and strife between human and robotic forces, with Falcon as an uneasy and at times unwilling intermediary between the two.