Kim Stanley Robinson at Borders, Oxford St, London 11-Mar-02

"It's not my fault," he says of writing massive books (The Years of Rice and Salt is over 700 pages long). "These ideas come to me and the natural shape of them suggests that they need to traverse two hundred years, or seven hundred years - while the novel, as a form, is best suited to anything between 24 hours and one lifetime".
Of course, in the Mars trilogy Robinson got around that 'one lifetime' limit via medical advances. He gets around it in The Years of Rice and Salt, too, though in an unexpected and (I thought at first) atypical way.

"Both [the Mars trilogy and The Years of Rice and Salt) are autobiographies. What else could they be?"
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Available in Dull (Wake up, Handspring!)

Bad Handspring. Naughty Handspring (makers of the Handspring Visor - Palm-except-prettier-and-cooler - which has transformed my life by allowing me to download web stuff and documents daily, and read & write all sorts of weird stuff wherever I am) ... Handspring have been advertising their latest model, the Neo, on their site. (How come everything's going rechargeable? I want to be able to fill up with batteries when I run out of power away from home!)
Anyway, the Neo comes in three colours: smoke, red and blue.
Except that the only colour available in the UK seems to be 'smoke'. (Read: dull grey).
After fifteen minutes bandying semantics with their enquiry line (see below), the situation seems to be:
"You can't buy a red Neo in the UK, because we don't sell them in the UK."
Well, yes. I'm sure there's a really good reason for this. Maybe we Brits are just so sophisticated. Or something.
But wait! This is the 21st century! Help is at hand!
( Read more... )