“There was something heartbreakingly beautiful about the lights of distant ships, I thought. It was something that touched both on human achievement and the vastness against which those achievements seemed so frail. It was the same thing whether the lights belonged to a caravel battling the swell on a stormy horizon or a diamond-hulled starship which had just sliced its way through interstellar space.”

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.