Despite the fact that Alastair Reynolds has published fiction in professional venues since 1990, with over thirty stories now in print, and has published six novels, two of which were nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and one of which ( Chasm City) won the British Science Fiction Association Award, this is his very first short fiction collection. It spans almost the whole of his career, ranging from "Enola" (which appeared in 1991, only his third sale) right up to recent work such as "Understanding Space and Time," a novella written in 2005, and "Signal to Noise," a new piece written specially for this book. It is the perfect showcase for the evolution of his writing and themes over the last sixteen years, and features extensive story notes.
Since 2000, Reynolds has been publishing large novels at a rate of one a year, all but two of them are set against a consistent background known as the Revelation Space universe. The stories in Zima Blue, however, while occasionally related to each other, do not partake of that claustrophobic, machine-haunted history. They represent a more optimistic take on humanity's future, a view that says there may be wars, there may be catastrophes and cosmic errors, but something human will still survive.