And I thought, “Well, I wonder if I can bring the two things together in some way.Appliance by J O Morgan ( Vintage, £16.99) And at the same time, I was also thinking about this kind of self-contained gothic science fiction novel. 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.Īnd I thought, “Well, it’s kind of interesting.” Computer graphics showed intermediate stages of sphere aversion in the article, and it just sort of struck me that this could be a good hook for a science fiction novel-a kind of governing metaphor where you could have things turning inside out.
I was kind of aware that there’s some interesting mathematics about things you can do with spheres, but this one caught my eye. Rob Wolf: Should we talk about the title for a moment? I mean, what does eversion mean?Īlastair 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 went into it with the mindset that I was writing a long novella because I knew that was achievable, and I thought I can really home in on the main character and maybe do some of the character work at novel length that I feel I’ve done in shorter works. It’s not a short novel, but by the standards of some of the others books I’ve written-science fiction and fantasy doorstoppers-it’s actually quite concise. It’s a wonder that any novels succeed at all.īut when you when you’re writing something that’s more contained, 20,000 words, you’ve got a shot of getting it polished. There’s so many parameters, so many things that can go wrong with a novel, so many plates that you have to keep juggling in the air.
I’m not saying you achieve perfection, but you can’t get anywhere near perfection in a novel. When you write a short story or a novella, you can get closer to something that you’re pleased with at the end of it. How big of a shift was it to go from something sprawling like that to the self-contained, first-person view of one character?Īlastair Reynolds: I’ve written quite a few novels, but I’ve also written a lot of short fiction, many, many short stories, and quite a few novellas. Brenda Noiseux: For much of your career you’ve written series of books or multiple books set in particular universes.
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