My train journey from Paddington station in London to the valleys of south Wales was uneventful. It featured a routine 17-year hop from Fand in the Lacaille 9352 system to Yellowstone around Epsilon Eridani, with 20,000 reefersleep colonists aboard. That said, First Great Western's trains were no more crowded nor slower than usual.
Near Swindon, I encountered a woman called Felka from the human colony within the Great Wall of Mars. And as the train arrived in Wales, there was the usual spectrum of invasive procedures concomitant with passage into Cadmus-Asterius in the 24th century.
On the branch line from Cardiff through the Rhondda, I dozed, only waking for a cloning-drowning operation by Pattern Jugglers in which every atom in the body was swapped for ones from the ocean beneath the sentient starbridge on the Pleiades Cluster in AD 4161. And when I got off the train, nobody checked my ticket, which was the strangest thing that happened on the whole trip.
Hardly any of these incidents happened to me, of course, but to the clones, cyborgs, humans and other weirdo life forms that populate Alastair Reynolds' books, which I was speed-reading as I travelled to interview him at his house in the Cynon Valley. I was coming to see the 43-year-old sci-fi writer because he has just become £1m richer thanks to a 10-year, 10-book deal he recently signed with his publisher, Orion. Until last week, I had never heard of this (probably) singular entity, the gentle millionaire Welsh astronomer who meets me. But I was enjoying his books so much, I wish I had got to know his work earlier.
It turns out that Reynolds is one of a handful of British sci-fi writers - such as Iain M Banks, M John Harrison and Paul McAuley - who are leading the world in imagining distant futures and remote galaxies. "I don't know why, but American sci-fi writers seem to focus on the near-future, which has given us Brits a clear run at the most fascinating," says the slippered Reynolds as we settle in his living room. "For me, the distant future and far-off galaxies is where it's at. That's where my imagination can really come out to play."
His most recent novel, House of Suns, is set 6.4m years from now, when humanity has spread throughout the Milky Way and the galaxy is pitted with human and post-human civilisations. Reynolds writes so-called "space opera" - but what does that mean?
"I see it as big-scale sci-fi, utterly and imaginatively exuberant with lots of dash, brio and panache. Oh yes, and the fates of entire planetary systems should be at stake, ideally."
But surely, given that he has a PhD in astronomy and worked for 12 years at the European Space Agency in Holland, he must temper that exuberance with the cold shower of scientific plausibility? That what he writes is not aimed at violating current scientific understanding?
"Sometimes I'm not interested in operating at that level. I always back off from being 100% science right. It's like in Dune, most of the science was all right and then it was spiced up with stuff that didn't make much sense scientifically. And the latter was more exciting, partly because it challenged readers' imaginations more."
Often, Reynolds' space operas resemble a series of 24. They start with a small crisis, then rapidly escalate to the point where a whole society is in jeopardy and only one or two people can save the day. He has already written eight novels and several collections of short stories, and his bestselling work is the so-called Revelation Space series of novels and stories, all set in an increasingly densely imagined universe.
"I started off with just the idea of killer robots and then it became more sophisticated because of the ramifications of the Fermi Paradox." (The paradox that highlights the apparent contradiction between the high probability of the existence of alien civilisations and the lack of evidence for, or our dearth of contact with, them.)
"In 'soft' sci-fi like Star Trek, the paradox wasn't even recognised," Reynolds says. "Humans had contact with aliens all the time, and the aliens were just a little bit more or less advanced than us - they may have had a little more warp drive, but ultimately we could compete with them. I thought it was much more likely that aliens and we would have an enormous technical disparity, to the extent that we could barely communicate. So the question is, what do you do with that in science fiction?
"In Revelation Space books, the backdrop is that the aliens are all wiped out by killer machines and so the universe is littered with ruins of their civilisations. It's an arse backwards answer to the paradox, but it gave me a lot of scope to develop a vast imaginary universe."
This gloomy cosmic backdrop has led Reynolds to be described as a dystopian writer. "It's true that my stories seem to deal with the end of the world. I've often been called the high priest of gothic miserablism, which is slightly unfair."
But it's not the alleged dystopianism that thrilled me when reading Reynolds's books. It's his different human factions who use technology to transcend their biological limitations - and the political ramifications. One faction in the Revelation Space sequence is called the Conjoiners and, by the early 22nd century, they have used neural implants to develop a common consciousness or hive mind - thereby achieving "transenlightenment".
Another, called the Coalition, violently opposes the idea of using neural implants, and fights against the Conjoiners' aim of spreading transenlightenment across the human race because it will destroy individual autonomy. "During the Iraq war," Reynolds explains, "the term 'coalition of the willing' was used and I hated that. So I called mine the Coalition for Neural Purity, which had a horrible, fascistic ring to it, and summed up my feelings about the war."
So is he opposed to changing human evolution by artificial means? "I'm more excited by its narrative possibilities than anything else."
A third faction, called the Demarchists, uses neural implants to achieve immediate non-representational democracy. All three are fighting wars throughout the solar system and beyond over whether human intelligence should be augmented beyond its natural limits. Surely all this is political allegory?
"That's not really what interests me. I'm a wishy-washy Guardian reader, but the last thing I want to do is force a political agenda down people's throats. It's not central to my work, unlike, say, China Miéville, who's very politicised. Some of the writers I really love, such as Larry Niven, sometimes wrote horrible rightwing sci-fi. The lesson to me was don't wear your politics in your fiction."
Throughout the Revelation Space sequence, Reynolds is asking the big questions: how much technology? What is it to be human? What is consciousness? "What I really like writing about is cloning, global warming and neuroscience."
Is he one of those scientists who aspires to upload his cranial database into something imperishable?
"Nah," laughs Reynolds. "There's a transhumanist tendency in sci-fi in which some writers can't wait to get their brains uploaded into cyberspace and get rid of their disgusting meat bodies. I'm not interested in that. I'm not that bothered about immortality."
Reynolds grew up in a town that sounds almost like one of his ruined alien civilisations. "I was born in Barry, south Wales, in 1966," he writes on his website. "This accounts for a lot. One third of the world's coal was exported out of Barry before the war, requiring a massive and fascinating infrastructure of docks, cranes, coal staithes and railway yards, much of which was still in place - albeit derelict and overgrown with weeds - when I was growing up. After the war, Barry was also the place where lots of old steam engines were brought to be cut up for scrap. I remember seeing hundreds of them, waiting in long rusting lines."
As we wander in his rustic Welsh garden, Reynolds says that ever since he was young he has had a thing about industrial archaeology. (Because I'm from the Black Country, I identify with that aesthetic.) His first encounter with science fiction came at the age of eight when he read Speed & Power magazine. "It was for small boys, and at the back it would reproduce a classic story by Arthur C Clarke. The stories were so clevely constructed and so simple that I loved them. I still do. What Clarke did was to write stories that treated human ignorance as the adversary. There was a marvellous purity in that, and I increasingly want to emulate what he achieved."
Reynolds was soon writing - with crayons - his own sci-fi stories. Did he get into astronomy because of the fiction he was writing and reading, or the other way round?
"The one reinforced the other. I remember collecting those cards from PG Tips, and I remember they said we'd be on Mars by 1980, and it didn't seem fanciful. There was Reagan promising the space station. Space travel just seemed so exciting, and it has remained so to me even though the space age seems - hopefully temporarily - over."
Reynolds did a degree in astronomy at Newcastle, then a PhD at St Andrews. "I was actually looking into a telescope at night and the next day number-crunching the data. And when I could, I wrote. By the time I was 18, I had written a couple of novels and that has stood me in good stead ever since - novels have never seemed like insurmountable peaks."
At the time, publishers weren't throwing £1m cheques at sci-fi writers. "It was hard to get published. Here, there was really only Interzone magazine - thank heavens for that - that took science fiction."
For the next 16 years, he wrote whenever he wasn't occupied with astronomical work. He worked in Holland for the European Space Agency, much of the time on the "S-Cam project", developing an ultra-sensitive camera to detect energy changes in space. Did the day job help with the writing? "A little. But it was, and is, also a constraint - I feel I have to get the astronomy bang on in the books, which is not what I feel with other disciplines."
He says he is inspired not by science journals but popular magazines such as New Scientist and Scientific American, which line his living room. "I particularly find I'm inspired by science outside my own discipline - probably because I can be freer with it than when I'm writing about astronomy."
Why did he leave the ESA to write full time? Typically, he gives a modest answer.
"In Holland, I got working with some really brainy scientists - they made me realise my limitations. It was like coming across Federer on the other side of the net. They could do calculations without breaking sweat that I could never manage. I was having to put in longer and longer hours to keep pace, which is what you do if you're not a genius of astrophysics." Eventually the job or the writing had to give: in 2004, he decided to become a full-time writer.
How useful is it to sci-fi writers to have scientific backgrounds? "I used to think it was essential: Arthur C Clarke had worked on radars during the war and on orbits later; Asimov was a biologist; Larry Niven studied maths. But then along came the cyberpunks, people such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, whom I love. They were often journalists fascinated by science - not just astronomy or starships or older sci-fi, but neurology and biology and cosmology. They moved on from the classic sci-fi ideas of space colonisation and dealt with the things that really interest me now, especially neuroscience, which has been something that has fascinated me ever since I read Oliver Sacks's case studies."
Reynolds tells me he read in New Scientist recently about how the brain teeters on the brink of chaos all the time. "That feels very much like the world a lot of my characters inhabit."
In the disarming afterword to his 2006 short story collection, Galactic North, he wrote: "Here's a shocking confession: I stole a lot of good ideas from other writers ... Much of the hard SF furniture of my universe - slower-than-light travel, coldsleep, machine intelligences - draws from ideas and motifs in the work of Gregory Benford." I can't imagine a writer of so-called literary fiction fessing up so candidly about what they've cribbed. "Yes," agrees Reynolds, "but sci-fi is different. It's almost like a co-operative enterprise - a big think-tank. Everybody uses and riffs on and comments on other people's ideas."
It sounds like the ethics and aesthetics of hip-hop, or like how science progresses. "It's a bit like both in that respect, and it's been going on for decades. For instance, there's long been this argument about the colonising of Mars, which has now reached its apogee in Kim Stanley Robinson's big fuck-off trilogy [Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars]. Now the time is right for another comment on Mars to move the thing along. That's how science fiction works."
But Reynolds' sci-fi, at least, also works in other ways. Last year, he had the closest thing to a religious experience that the rationalist astronomer has ever had, and it made him want to change his literary direction.
"[My wife] Josette and I went on a trip to the Kennedy Space Centre. I'm a rationalist, but what I experienced there was as near to religious awe as I'm likely to feel. They simulated the moon landing, with the countdown and the original audio and a lunar module model descending from the ceiling. It was like a religious experience. I've never felt anything like that before. And then we saw a space shuttle launch. It moved me greatly.
"And that's fed into my fiction. I'm now writing a trilogy about the way we go out of our solar system and colonise more distant planets. It'll be more about the romance of space travel, with a lot of hard sci-fi about artificial intelligence."
Isn't the £1m Orion deal a great pressure on him? "Yes, it is, but writing a book a year suits me. Apart from the fact that it's very solitary - I do miss the social life work gives you."
He shows me his study, where he's contracted to spend a lot of time during the next decade. It's a small room he shares with three guitars. "I always need to write in a small space, to feel cocooned. It's the opposite of how Jack Nicholson wrote in The Shining."
So what, if anything, does he think will drive us to resume space exploration and set us on the path to realising his star-tripping fictions?
Is it Stephen Hawking's thought that we've done so much damage to Earth, that we should get on with colonising other planets? "Not for me. As much as I'm an advocate of space flight, it's a bad idea to trash this planet and move to the next one. That wouldn't help ... For me, space flight is all about the biological imperative. We won't do it because we've trashed the planet, but because we can. And that's surely optimistic. In the Revelation Space stories, humanity is fragile and on the brink of extinction but it's an optimistic outlook - we're still out there, in the distant future, struggling to survive and make ourselves better".