Alastair Reynolds on Returning to Revelation Space in Elysium Fire

Prefect Dreyfus is a part of the Panoply, a security force that monitors the 100 million inhabitants of the Glitter Band. Made up of thousands of habitats in orbit of the planet Yellowstone, this celestial city largely represents humanity at the height of peace and prosperity, leaving little need for a police force. Though it ties into the larger series, The Prefect is a prequel, and as such, quite accessible to new readers, though Revelation Space fans will recognize Dreyfus’ adventures take place roughly a century before things start to go south for humankind in the series proper.
Elysium Fire begins with a murder mystery: people begin dying as their all-important neural implants gruesomely fail. While at first the deaths seem random, Panoply quickly establishes a pattern exists—if only they could figure out what it is. As the body count ticks upward, Dreyfus and company are besieged by the followers of a man named Devon Garlin, who is using the events of the previous novel to instigate an anti-Panoply movement with the potential to leave the entire Glitter Band vulnerable.
Like the best of Reynolds’ books, the novel manages to interweave mind-blowing ideas and hard science fiction with very believably human characters and a real thoughtfulness about the promise and perils of technology. The one-time physicist and prolific novelist was kind enough to chat with us about the new book, the science of Revelation Space, and the TV show 24. He also answers the all-important question: where the aliens at?

There’s often a fair bit of hard science in the books (not surprising given your background). How important is that to you when building your novels?
It’s always going to be there on some level, I think (I love science) but the extent to which it’s high or low in the mix will depend on the demands of the story, with some of them having a more foregrounded approach to the science, and other less so. I do like to keep things fresh for myself, as well, by varying things from book to book, so you’ll get a book like Revenger in which the science is very sketchy and implicit, and then one like Elysium Fire which plays in a slightly more realistic context. It really depends on my mood and to some degree a reaction against the previous book.
In a similar vein: as the years have gone by, have you had to fundamentally rethink any ideas because of advances in real-world astrophysics?
No, but I’m sure it will happen. For instance, quite a lot of Absolution Gap revolves around one set of ideas from braneworld cosmology, which is in turn an extension of string theory, but if that turns out to be an outmoded theory (as it well might) then some of the things in the book will end up looking dated, or just plain wrong. But I would hope the book had some strengths that carried it through that. We wouldn’t refuse to read an older SF book just because it referred to a steady-state cosmology, for instance, so long as the core of the book still had something to offer us.
Elysium Fire is the first full-length return to the Revelation Space universe in a decade. What draws you back to those worlds?
I like the settings, the technology, the alien-human interactions (such as they are), and also some of the recurring characters and dynasties. Fundamentally, although they can be challenging to write (because of the narrative constraints implied by the other stories and books already written) it’s fun when they come out right, and I always have a sense that there’s a certain mood or tonality which fits well with the universe. If I have half an idea for a story that has a particular gothic or horror sensibility, for instance, I will always have a go at incorporating it into the RS universe—although it doesn’t always work, and the story has to end up in some other form. I also enjoy the fact that the RS setting has been out there long enough that there are readers who like it as well.

Both of the Prefect Dreyfus books are marketed (fairly, I think) as police procedurals. Do you approach these stories in a fundamentally different way?
When I started The Prefect, my only goal was to find a story that enabled me to show off some of the highlights of this utopian society. Early on I decided that I would focus on a security organization, dealing with threats to the democratic integrity of the Glitter Band, and that there would be a slowly developing crisis which unfolded into something larger. My model for that was the TV series 24, rather than a detective drama as such, but there are plenty of overlaps. In both instances (24 and a cop show, for instance) you’ve got protagonists following clues, racing against time, etc.
From a writer’s standpoint, the technical challenges are pretty similar. You’ve got to build a drama, lay the clues, play fair with the reader, and arrive at some sort of resolution. The only big technical headache I had in The Prefect was whether or not to include scenes from the baddies’ points of view, and in the end I again took my lead from 24, where you always saw both sides of the drama. That model than flowed through for Elysium Fire, so again there are scenes which take us out of the eyes of The Prefects, although a little more obliquely this time. Hopefully I can vary the mix again when I do another Dreyfus novel, as I intend to!
The Prefect’s latest case involves tech gone wrong: users being killed by their own neural implants. This ambiguity about tech is a bit of a theme with your work. Are you generally positive about the course of human technology and science, or should I be worried?
I’m mostly on the cautious side of optimistic, although I do reserve the right to change my mind. A year or two ago, for instance, if you’d asked me whether the internet and the World Wide Web were broadly good things, I’d have given a strongly affirmative answer. I’m a little more doubtful now, especially if you regard the various flowerings of social media as natural developments of the web. I suppose it’s not an untypical reaction, but I’m increasingly inclined to view some aspects of social media as destructive and counter to the common good. Just to take the small microcosm of SF, for instance, there’s no doubt in my mind that the discourse has been very badly damaged in recent years, and part of that has been down to the general heating-up of the conversation because of social media, as well as the acceleration into tribalism and in-groupism. On the other hand, I’m not a Luddite; I love aspects of the World Wide Web and I’m amazed at some of the modern capabilities of computing power, that are now open and accessible to the masses.

The Revelation Space universe is a wide-open storytelling landscape, but it’s been delineated pretty well at this point. Is is getting harder to fit in new stories?
It’s always tricky until I write a new story, and that often tends to open the door to a couple more in quick succession. So they come in clusters (to me, at least) and then the door squeezes shut until next time! I’m not interested in completism for its own sake, either, so just because some events might have been referenced in some book or story, doesn’t mean I ever intend to write about them. Sometimes leaving things unwritten is the best approach.
Along those lines, what does the future of the overarching series look like from 2018? I’d suspect that you’re nowhere near done with it.
No, I don’t feel done with it— hope I never do. I’ve got very loose plans to continue with Dreyfus for a book or two more, maybe even three, but before that I’m intending to return to the other end of the timeline, so to speak, with a novel set around the time of Absolution Gap and beyond. It wouldn’t be a direct continuation of that earlier sequence, but it would be another book set largely against the backdrop of the Inhibitor threat.
Revelation Space answers the question one way, but I’m curious: if pressed, what’s your own sense of the answer to the Fermi Paradox?
I’m largely on the side of there’s no one else out there. One civilization has to be first, and although the universe is a pretty big place, the flipside is that it’s not terribly old—at least not in evolutionary timescale terms. So I don’t find it absurd to think that we might be alone, given that intelligence seems to have been a pretty late development on Earth, and that life might have carried on being pretty boring and single-celled for billions of years, for all we know. That said, I’m a fan of SETI and I think we would be wise to keep searching, and keep thinking about new ways of searching, and above all keep our minds open.
Elysium Fire is available now.