Zima Blue and Other Stories


Zima Blue and Other Stories is the first collection of short works by Alastair Reynolds. It was published in September 2006, by Night Shade Books. It includes ten stories, most of them long out of print. None of the stories in it are set in Reynolds's well-known Revelation Space universe. However Galactic North, a collection of most of Reynolds's Revelation Space short stories, was released soon after.
There is a limited edition with an extra story, "Digital to Analogue", and with Reynolds's signature. "Digital to Analogue" was originally published in the 1992 anthology In Dreams.
A new version of the collection was published in April 2009 and contained all the stories listed below as well as Minla's Flowers, Cardiff Afterlife and Everlasting.

Contents

  • Introduction by Paul J. McAuley
  • "Angels of Ashes"
  • "Beyond the Aquila Rift"
  • "Enola"
  • "Hideaway"
  • "Merlin's Gun"
  • "The Real Story"
  • "Spirey and the Queen"
  • "Understanding Space and Time"
  • "Zima Blue"
There was also one brand new story included, "Signal to Noise", which Reynolds had recently finished and for which Reynolds was shortlisted for the 2006 British Science Fiction Association award for short fiction .
For each story in the collection, Reynolds provides a personal afterword in which he discusses the story's genesis, influences, and such, which might be of interest to the reader.

Adaptations

On March 10, 2019, Alastair Reynolds announced that his short story "Zima Blue" was adapted as part of Netflix's animated anthology Love, Death & Robots. This story, along with "Beyond the Aquila Rift" are the first Reynolds' works to be adapted for TV or film.