tamaranth | 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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