The right of Alastair Reynolds to be identified as the
author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This collection first published in this form in Great Britain
in 2009 by Gollancz
An imprint of the Orion Publishing Group
Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin's Lane, London WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company

'The Real Story', first published in
Mars Probes
, edited by Peter Crowther, DAW Books,
2002.
'Beyond the Aquila Rift', first published in
Constellations
, edited by Peter Crowther, DAW
Books, 2005.
'Enola', first published in a somewhat different form in
Interzone
, December 1991.
'Signal to Noise', first published in
Zima Blue and Other Stories
, Night Shade Books, 2006.
'Cardiff Afterlife', first published in
The Big Issue Cymru
, August 2008.
'Hideaway', first published in
Interzone
, July 2000.
'Minla's Flowers', first published in
The New Space Opera
,
edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan, Eos, 2007.
'Merlin's Gun', first published in
Interzone
, May 2000.
'Angels of Ashes', first published in
Asimov's Science Fiction
, July 1999.
'Spirey and the Queen', first published in
Interzone
, June 1996.
'Understanding Space and Time', first published as a chapbook by the
Birmingham Science Fiction Group for Novacon 35, November 2005.
'Digital to Analogue', first published in
In Dreams
,
edited by Paul J. McAuley and Kim Newman, Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1992.
'Everlasting', first published in
Interzone
, Spring 2004.
'Zima Blue', first published in
Postscripts
, Summer 2005.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

eISBN : 978 0 5750 8610 4

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

www.orionbooks.co.uk

This ebook produced by Jouve, France

To the members of the Short Story Clearing House, past, present and future, with deep gratitude.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

By the time this book first appeared, more than five years had passed since the idea of it was first mooted in an e-mail to me from Jason Williams of Night Shade Books. Not long afterwards, Marty Halpern (better known for his work with Golden Gryphon Press) generously consented to shepherd the book towards publication. At the time, it was a very real possibility that the book might be produced sometime in 2002, or - failing that - 2003 at the very latest.

Unfortunately, other factors intervened (novel deadlines, job stuff, real life, etc.) and I had to keep backing out of commitments to deliver the stories by an agreed date, with the result that the book - as the years ticked inexorably by - began to look less and less likely to actually happen. Thankfully, Jason (and Jeremy Lassen, his partner in Night Shade Books) kept the faith, and when I finally did announce that I was ready to tackle it again, they responded not with howls of disbelief but with gratifying enthusiasm. So too did Marty, who was as energetic and diligent an editor as any writer could ask for.

So, thanks, guys - Jason, Jeremy and Marty - not just for sticking in there, but also for valuing short fiction in the first place, and I promise that if we
ever
do another one of these . . .

Alastair Reynolds
Noordwijk,
The Netherlands
May 2006

A Note on the UK Edition (2009)

When Gollancz agreed to bring out a British edition of this collection, it seemed sensible to take the opportunity to slot in the third (chronologically second) Merlin story - 'Minla's Flowers' - which had not actually existed at the time Marty Halpern and I put together the original collection. At which point, of course, we had a subtly different book on our hands . . . so why not add something else while we were at it? I wanted to include 'Everlasting', which for some reason I had never submitted to Marty when we were making the cut for the Night Shade edition (we wouldn't have had room for it if I had in any case; something else would have had to go). It also seemed right to include 'Cardiff Afterlife', a sequel to 'Signal to Noise' and another near-future piece.

It's time to reiterate my thanks to Marty Halpern for being a sterling editor on the Night Shade edition, to Jason and Jeremy for making the original collection happen, and to thank Jo Fletcher and Malcolm Edwards of Gollancz and Lisa Rogers for their enthusiasm and hard work in producing this expanded edition.

Alastair Reynolds
Rhondda Cynon Taf,
Wales
October 2008

INTRODUCTION

I'm pretty sure that it was a dark and stormy night when I first met Alastair Reynolds. This was no pathetic fallacy, you understand, just the usual weather for a winter's evening on the east coast of Scotland, on top of a ridge that looked out towards the North Sea and Norway: even though I lived about two miles inland, it wasn't unusual to find salt spray frosting the windows of a morning. It was 1990. I was working as a lecturer in botany at St Andrews University; Al was finishing his Ph.D. at the astronomy department. He'd found out from the biographical matter at the end of one of my stories in
Interzone
that I lived in St Andrews, had given me a call, and come slogging up the hill for the first of many pleasant evenings spent in the village bar, talking about science and science fiction and the business of writing and publishing. I don't want to give the impression that I was Al's Svengali. Far from it. Al was an SF fan, but he was also, most definitely, no two ways about it, a writer. He'd been writing SF since his early teens; he'd sold a couple of stories to
Interzone
; he was in for the long haul.

But before I tell you about Al Reynolds and the stories collected here, I need to say something about the New Space Opera. That doesn't mean that I'm going to attempt to analyse Al's role in the resurgence of space opera, or define his place within the group of British science fiction writers who in one way or another are associated with it. For one thing, if you ask a bunch of people like Iain M. Banks, Stephen Baxter, Peter F. Hamilton, M. John Harrison, Ian McDonald, Ken MacLeod, Justina Robson and Charles Stross why they're writing the stuff, you'll get a different answer from each and every one. For another, there are plenty of American writers who, like the Brits, have been engaged in reinventing and refurbishing space opera's cherished but almost fatally tarnished and rusted tropes. In short, the New Space Opera is more of a confluence than a movement: a wide range of writers working on a broad spectrum of themes without the benefit of either a prophet or a manifesto.

While individual writers each have their own interests and reasons for reworking space opera, they're all building their various fictions on a common foundation. Like the old space opera of E.E. 'Doc' Smith, Edmund Hamilton and a host of unsung pulp writers, the New Space Opera sets its stories against vast backdrops of both time and space, and its characters are often engaged in superhuman efforts on which the fate of humanity is hung, but it's also closely engaged with hard science (from quantum physics and cosmology to evolutionary biology, bioengineering and cybernetics) and asks tough questions (who are we? why are we here? where are we going?) about humanity's place in a hostile universe. Its stories are informed by a sense of Deep Time and secret histories imperfectly understood and closely associated with cosmological mysteries, and are played out against a culturally rich patchwork of governments, economies, alliances and alien species rather than the monolithic empires of old.

Al Reynolds is best known for a series that's deeply imbued with the virtues of classic New Space Opera. His first four novels,
Revelation Space
,
Chasm City
,
Redemption Ark
and
Absolution Gap
, together with his seventh novel,
The Prefect
, and shorter fictions collected in
Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days
and
Galactic North
, fit into the overarching framework of a future history that spans some forty thousand years and describes the conflicts and struggle for survival of two rival branches of humanity in a galaxy littered with the artefacts of ancient civilisations and patrolled by alien killing machines. Most commonly called the 'Revelation Space' series, it's notable for its darkly tinted moral ambiguities, the gothic rococo detailing of its vast machineries and cosmic backdrops, and multiple storylines that begin in different times and places and gradually and relentlessly converge.

Now, none of the stories in this collection are part of the 'Revelation Space' series, but it's clear that they're all drawn from the same well of themes, concerns and tropes, most notably a tough-minded depiction of the fragility of ordinary human life, and the defiant persistence of human spirit, in the raw wild deeps of space and time. And as in the 'Revelation Space' series, their protagonists are most often ordinary working stiffs caught up in huge events whose ramifications they can barely glimpse but must unriddle in order to survive, and whose cynical attitudes and side-of-the-mouth quips tinge their narratives with a
noir
hue. Spirey, in 'Spirey and the Queen', for instance, can't resist making a characteristically caustic remark with what might be her last breath while fighting to gain control of a spaceship that's the only way of escaping a seemingly insignificant splinter of ice whose secret chambers are being riddled with kinetic weapons fired by what was once his own side, in a war for control of the resources of a protoplanetary disc. Crammed with eye-kicks, pell-mell action, and big ideas about what it means to be human and the future and nature of intelligent life, it could easily stand as the taxonomic-type specimen of the New Space Opera, the golden mean to which all others aspire. And if you think that's pretty impressive, bear in mind that Al Reynolds had published just five stories before it appeared. We're talking about some kind of writer, here.

Although, as Brian Aldiss once remarked, you no more need to be a scientist to write science fiction than you need to be a ghost to write ghost stories, Al has professional qualifications in Thinking Big. Until just a little while ago, he was an astrophysicist working for the European Space Agency, with a B.Sc. and Ph.D. in astronomy. And as in the 'Revelation Space' series, he brings to the stories in this collection a scientific rigour that firmly grounds his speculations in theories and ideas current in the happening world. Many of his stories are set on other planets or around distant stars, and most are large in scope, and their plots often turn on lacunae where characters drop out of history for decades or centuries, because of a steadfast refusal to violate Einsteinian principles. Even when some kind of faster-than-light travel is featured, as in the three related stories, 'Hideaway', 'Minla's Flowers' and 'Merlin's Gun', it's both difficult and dangerous - and with typical irony the grail of their protagonist's quest turns out to be something other than the superweapon he was expecting. This sense of cosmic
agape
(and goofy riffs on a certain singer with a penchant for big boots and even bigger spectacles) informs the redemptive arc of Al's last-man-alive story, 'Understanding Space and Time'; in 'Beyond the Aquila Rift', accidental exile isn't something you can get around by reversing the polarity of the neutrino generator; and in 'Angels of Ashes', human survival is revealed to be a matter of quantum probability rather than the predestiny or special pleading that's typical of old space opera. Like all the best New Space Opera writers, Al is deeply in love with the tropes and spectacular disjunctions between human and cosmic scales of the old stuff, but it's a tough love that takes no prisoners.

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