Alastair Reynolds On Sentient Squids, AI, & Writing Like an SF Grandmaster in The Medusa Chronicles

What were the most challenging aspects of trying to write in Arthur C. Clarke’s style? Or did you and Stephen strive to create a unique style that still paid homage to Clarke?
We’re both steeped in Clarke, so you could argue that our default voices aren’t tremendously far from that of Clarke to begin with. We’ve both kept up our familiarity with his work, especially the classic stuff that still holds up well today, so I think we had a reasonable sense going into this of what would and wouldn’t seem out of place in a Clarke work. Of course our intention wasn’t to write a straight-up pastiche, but to bring our common sensibilities to bear on the subject matter, and try to be respectful to Clarke’s vision while also not holding ourselves back.
It is clear that Howard and Adam have a father-son relationship, with all the complications that entails. Did you set out to write it in that way or did that naturally happen over the course of writing the novel?
We had an outline before we started writing, and it was clear from that outline that Howard was going to be playing role of mentor to the machines, with a strong bond to one machine in particular. The father-son dynamic seemed to fall naturally out of that assumption, and then once we saw where it was going, we worked hard to make it a strong component of the novel as a whole.
The fact that Howard Falcon is a hybrid human and machine puts him in a very unique position. Do you feel there are parallels to this character in other major science fiction novels and if so why is the role of the hybrid so important?There have been attempts at defining SF but terms that often come up include “estrangement” and “the other”, so I think it’s to be expected that the form often gravitates to the protagonist as outsider, or perhaps go-between. SF readers themselves often feel that they stand slightly outside mainstream culture as well, so they tend to identify with these somewhat isolated, “loner” figures. As to the more explicit role of the human-machine hybrid, the one that came to mind most strongly for me was the character in Fred Pohl’s Man Plus, who is surgically modified for life on Mars. That book was written only a few years after Clarke’s original novella, so something was obviously in the air. And we shouldn’t forget Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man, who was also rebuilt after an aviation accident. That would have aired on British TV around the same time I read the original novella.
We’ve heard a lot lately about sentient creatures, including Inky, the famous octopus who escaped from a New Zealand aquarium just two months ago. Do you believe humans are beginning to expand their previous definitions of what a sentient being is? And how might that apply to robots?
I’ve always been skeptical of the idea that sentience is going to be an exclusively human attribute. I’m very interested in animal cognition and lately there’s been a lot of rethinking of traditional boundaries and assumptions. Elephants and some primates seem to have a sense of self, in that they recognize their own image in mirrors, and the same thing seems to apply to some birds. We also now know that birds pack a lot of neural wiring into their small brains! So I think it quite natural that as we expand our definition of sentience to take in other animals (including octopuses, I’d imagine) then we’ll also have to start asking hard questions about the role of consciousness in machines.

Adam feels grief for the loss of machines on the slinger but is not sympathetic to the medusas, from whom they want to harvest organs. Is this the same weakness of humans reflected again with machines? The flaw of the father passed to the son?
Very much so. We didn’t want to put Adam on an ethical pedestal, but rather to suggest that the machines are making the same mistakes and advancements as people, only in a much more accelerated timeframe. It was important to us that there be mistakes and regrets on both sides, or else Howard would have been pulled too strongly to one pole or another. He had to be continuously torn in his loyalties.
Tech leaders such as Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Steve Wozniak have warned of the dangers of our increased reliance on artificial intelligence, noting it ccould potentially be more dangerous than nuclear weapons. What are your opinions about this view?
I think it’s a little over-blown myself. I still think we are many, many decades—if not centuries—from creating a true thinking machine, with human-level intelligence and a sense of self-awareness. The laptop computer I’m using now is much faster than the old PC in my office, but they’re both equally stupid. I would much rather we concentrated on the immediate, still-potent dangers, such as nuclear weapons, runaway climate change and so on. Sort those out, then worry about Hal 9000.
What are most fun and most difficult parts of writing a novel that spans so many centuries?
Steve and I both like playing with these grand sweeps of time, especially when you have a narrator that can view the passage of history through one set of eyes – even if they’re cybernetic eyes. The fun part is that you can set up these epic perspectives, these vistas of crumbling cities or what not, and hopefully send a real shiver of vertigo through the reader. The hard part, I suppose, is doing all that and still keeping a human focus to the story, without it all becoming a little chill and Stapledonian—not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. Like any aspect of writing, it’s all fun, and all hard, all at the same time!
The humans in The Medusa Chronicles recognize whales, chimpanzees, and even medusas as legal person (non-human). Why not have humans create a first contact protocol to allow machines the same rights and privileges as these animals?
Perhaps they should have – but we took as our jumping off point Clarke’s statement that there were troubled centuries to come, tensions between humans and machines, and it seemed natural to posit a suspicion of artificial intelligence as leading to those tensions. Also, social conventions can reverse over time, so you might get a period of open-mindedness followed by a period of insularity and suspicion. I can’t imagine what’s just made me think of that.
The Medusa Chronicles is available now.