I have returned to ESA to talk about the interplay between science and science fiction, and have spoken on similar topics at many academic departments. I was sad to leave science, but since my departure in 2004, I’ve been blessed by some amazing chances to again move through scientific circles, only this time from the perspective of a writer.

SF is a toolkit with a billion applications. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my fiction is strongly informed by my time as a scientist. More than anything, what attracted me to SF – and continues to do so – is the scope offered for almost infinite creative possibility. My research area was astronomy and astrophysics, and I spent a long period of time working in and around the European Space Agency’s main research establishment in the Netherlands. Professionally, I was a scientist before I became a full-time writer, although the two professions overlapped for a good few years. My work is widely translated and republished. A huge career-retrospective “best of” appeared in 2016 (see below), marking more than a quarter of a century of publication since my first sale.

I have published three collection of shorter work, as well as a few chapbooks containing one or two novella-length stories. I’m the author of rather a lot of science fiction novels, as well as more than sixty pieces of shorter fiction, ranging in length from vignettes of a few hundred words to works that are almost short novels in their own right. The author with some industrial archaeology.

Alastair reynolds aquila rift