Publishers Weekly interviews Kim Stanley Robinson about his "mindblowing" new novel 2312, and some sections that were too lengthy for the magazine have gone up online. Including a great part where Robinson talks about borrowing from John Brunner and John Dos Passos, to use collage and different types of writing to fill out a whole world, in lieu of lots of exposition.
He also explains why the wealth of scientific ideas and terminology out there can our literary culture a new vitality:
Art in our time is strongest when it is aware of science, includes science, is inspired by science, or is about science. On the linguistic level, the new words coined by scientists to describe their new discoveries form a giant growing lexicon that means English is simply bursting with new possibilities, resembling the Elizabethan age in that respect. Then conceptually, science is creating new stories to tell, by deluging us with new information and potentialities. In this deluge we need art to do its usual job of sorting things out, by giving things their human dimension and by exploring how they might feel and what they might mean. So to me the arts and the sciences are completely intertwined. Maybe that's always been true, but now more than ever.
The whole thing is well worth checking out. [Publishers Weekly]