Britain’s Guardian is reporting that Welsh author Alastair Reynolds has signed a ten-book deal with Gollancz. The £1 million deal ties him to the house that published his first eight novels for the next decade, at the rate of one book per year. Reynolds is represented by Robert Kirby of United Agents, in London, England.
Of the deal, Reynolds said “It gives me a huge amount of security for the next ten years, and writers don’t have a lot of security. Even at the best of times you’re worrying about the next deadline, the next contract. To have that in place is fantastic for me.”
His editor, Jo Fletcher, says the contract is more than a vote of confidence. “We don’t sling that sort of money around lightly. Al’s got big ideas for the future and we wanted to make that happen, but it’s also a signal to the publishing industry that we’re taking him seriously, and that they need to.”
The 43-year-old Reynolds made his first sale to Interzone in 1989. His first novel, Revelation Space, came out in 2000, and was the basis for much of his novel work. Before making the jump to full-time writing last year, he spent 16 years as an astronomer working for the European Space Agency in the Netherlands.
Editor and writer Maxim Jakubowski is quoted in the Guardian saying this is the biggest sf deal in the UK in at least a decade. “A ten-book deal is almost unheard of, and is a real expression of faith. [Reynolds] is certainly in the top ten of UK science fiction writers, if not the top five.”
Reynolds said he has the first three books already mapped out. It will be an “African-inflected trilogy charting how humanity might go on to conquer the solar system and the galaxy.”