Des news de Kim Stanley Robinson

[jerome]

Kim Stanley Robinson a évoqué son nouveau roman : The Galileans.

"My research for The Years of Rice and Salt included lots of reading about the birth of science," said Robinson. "I learned more than I could use in that book, so I thought it would be good to return to the matter, as being crucial to society today and, if I wrote about it, a particular kind of science fiction. Galileo is central to the scientific revolution, and also he gave me a number of science-fictional angles from which to approach the topic. He's a great character."


"I'm still involved in all the research, so it'll be an ongoing process as I write the book. It's a deep pleasure to dive into a subject, something that transcends the research needs of a novel. It's a way of directing and focusing one's interest for a time.

"I've discovered many interesting facts about Galileo already. I had not known how completely he'd worked out the orbit times of the four Galilean moons of Jupiter; or how he'd devised a method of determining longitude by observing how early or late the moons came out of the shadow of Jupiter compared to when they would have if seen from Rome or the Canary Islands or wherever one chose to set zero degrees longitude. A very neat trick although the various Spanish and Dutch government agencies he tried to sell the idea to were not convinced they could make it work.

"Also, I hadn't been aware of how fully he worked out the protocols for physical experiments, and how unwilling he was to speculate beyond his results to any kind of first causes. It's a very modern attitude."

"The Galileans will be published by Voyager in August 2009 but it doesn't look that far in the future to me! Remember this date implies that I turn the text in near the end of 2008, and here we are in mid-2007. So I'd better go get to work!"

http://www.uksfbooknews.net/2007/06/09/ ... galileans/