“How did you . . . pass the time?’ Sunday asked. ‘You couldn’t just ching out of it, could you?’‘We had a different form of chinging,’ Eunice said. ‘An earlier type of virtual-reality technology, much more robust and completely unaffected by time lag. You may have heard of it. We called it “reading”.”

Welsh science fiction author

Alastair Preston Reynolds is a Welsh science fiction author. He is known for hard science fiction and space opera, and his work is closely associated with those traditions. His fiction explores ideas grounded in science, then expands them into large-scale imagined futures and interstellar settings. He is especially identified with the technical rigour of hard science fiction and the broader sweep of space opera.