Alastair Reynolds's Blog

 Hi folks, yes it's me back again with another plea for your generosity as we move into the final couple of months before the Cardiff Half.

Last year I ran on behalf of Alzheimer's UK and thanks to the kindness and deep pockets of my supporters, including many who read this blog, we managed to raise just shy of two thousand pounds. Earlier this year we also did well with my RED January challenge for the Mind over Mountains mental health charity, in which I did a hundred days of consecutive runnin...

 I'll shortly be rattling the can for my Cardiff Half Marathon cancer research sponsorship, but in the meantime here are a few new things worthy of mention.

The two Revelation Space short story collections I mentioned last time are now out in the world, and it's very nice to see them. As indicated, these gather all the stories previously compiled in the two collections Galactic North and Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days, as well as the material I've written since those two books: Monkey Suit, Open an...

 Things are moving in the direction of publication for HALCYON YEARS, I'm pleased to report, although I don't yet have a reliable publication date to share. I'd take September with a modicum of salt as I've yet to see any cover art or copy, and not much tends to happen in publishing during the traditionally slow summer months - although I could be wrong! I've completed the proofreading stage, though, which is generally the last point at which I have any real input into the text, and we've select...

 If you'd asked me to read a 600-plus page novel about a Harlem furniture salesman trying to walk a line between the crooked and straight worlds, I might not have felt I had the stamina. But I blasted through these two recent books back to back, and I think they've cemented Colson Whitehead as my favorite contemporary American writer.

They're not exactly novels. Each book takes a decade as its broad theme and traces the story of Ray Carney through three novella-sized capers that are equal parts c...

 La Maison des Soleils, the French edition of my 2008 novel HOUSE OF SUNS, was recently awarded the Grand Prix de L'Imaginaire at La Comédie du Livre in Montpellier. I'm delighted with this award, not just because my friends at Belial have been doing a grand job bringing my work back into the French market, but because (as far as I can remember) it's the first award of any kind picked up by HOS. Not that books have an automatic entitlement to awards, but it's one of my personal favorites and the...

 That's that done, then. I completed my 100th consecutive run.

For those good at maths who are thinking, hang on, it's only day 99 of 2025, my RED January running challenge did indeed start on Jan 1, but my running streak started a day earlier, when I ran Nos Galan on New Year's Eve. I've logged 499.5 kms of running across these 100 days, but that's a slight underestimate as I forgot to start (or restart) my Garmin properly on a few of the runs, meaning I can be comfortable in saying the total is...

 My newts are thriving after the winter:

They're beautiful creatures, but I can't help missing the frogs that the newts appear to have displaced. Perhaps the frogs will make a return, though.

In other vertebrate news (vastly preferable to the actual news) we've been enjoying some spectacular bat activity these last few nights, with five or six pipistrelles above us at any one time. I'm still a newbie when it comes to bat identification, but we appear to have a mixture of common and soprano pipistr...

 So good! I played this four times back to back the first time I heard it.

 Thanks to the support of those who contributed to my RED January running challenge, we managed to raise 180 pounds for the Mind Over Mountains mental health charity. I was feeling pretty good about my running at the end of January, so I decided to push on with the streak. Yesterday was Day 75, but it was actually my 76th day of consecutive running as I ran Nos Galan on December 31st. With the daffodils out, and occasional outbreaks of sunshine, that's starting to feel like a fair while ago.

My t...

 My friends from Showcase Performing Arts will be staging "Guys & Dolls" over four nights from April 9 to April 12 at the Coliseum Theatre in Aberdare. We've been working very hard on this timeless musical and are looking forward to show week, in just under a month. If you're in the South Wales area, why not come along and see our production? The Coliseum is a beautiful period venue, so much so that the BBC recently used it as a Stratford-on-Avon stand-in for the forthcoming feature film "Mr Bur...