I am very terrible about remembering titles but get a feel for authors. There was a story i read that was an extremely slow downfall of "the grid". Two children that had educated parents that had moved them into the country because of what they believed to be danger in the cities oncoming. Together they learned gardening and other obvious self sufficientcy living.  What struck me about this story was how in the first part of the book, the young girl character said something to effect of no-one noticed the fall because it happend so slowly. Everyone just got used to the power going out every once in a while. But slowly it increased until there was no "grid" ETC. anyone have a clue?

Hello!

Je dois dire que j'ai eu du mal, mais terminer la Trilogie Martienne m'a vraiment fait beaucoup de bien. Une petite pause en passant par d'autres auteurs, mais vivement "Les Martiens", "Chroniques des Années Noires", et, malheureusement, bien d'autres sont très mal distribués en Belgique.

Malgré un style parfois soporifique, la richesse de contenu submerge le lecteur féru de sciences humaines, de géographie, de physique, d'astronomie, de génétique, ou encore de biologie.

Impossible bien sûr de tout retenir, de tout assimiler... Et on ne résume pas 15 ans de travail en 2000 pages.

J'ignore dans quelle mesure les Martiens approfondissent les rapprochements avec d'authentiques disciplines scientifiques (la sociologie par exemple), mais ce qui est sûr c'est que lire KSR est une expérience unique pour tout féru de SF... Certes un futur incontournable! Déjà que là... 8)

Really struggling with Galileo's Dream. Like the premise and the plot but the "hard science" is way overdone and boring and detracting from the story. Either Galileo is sour and a grouch or immersed in stuff I just do not understand to that depth. Would love to finish but have put it down for now. I read a lot of sci-fi, but this one is out of balance if you ask me.

I've never read a quartet (including The Martians) twice with the possible exception of The Foundation Series but I'm too old to remember.

I just wanted to thank Dr. Kim for his work. I'm now back to Red Mars for the third time in a year.

It's the next best thing to being there.

David

Hi!

J'ai lu les 3 livres mars la rouge, la verte et la bleue, et ils ont littéralement changé ma façon de voir les choses.
Le système politique, basé sur l'éco-économie, est vraiment passionnant.

Bien que ces livres soient un peu longs parfois (les parties avec Ann me semblent un peu ennuyeuses), et qu'à d'autres ils ne le soient pas assez (certaines technologies sont peu décrites), la globalité de la trilogie est vraiment géniale.

Kim Stanley est à mes yeux un génie, et j'espère qu'il va poursuivre ses talents d'écrivain, sociologue, économiste et scientifique amateur.

I m enjoying this ''science in the capital'' very much... although Frank's considerations are bit lenghty and i felt like something is missing in the 'conversio'.

It might sound odd, but your fiction brings much more reality to the environmental issues than all the serious stuff i may read.
Not so odd you may tell since that's what well writen fiction does...bring in the emotions without which there is no full human experience of reality.
But still odd for I still can feel reality in fact based litterature.

The cause i'm sure is the optimist (or proactive) stance in the novel.
It's too often that my hearing / reading on these issues is hampered by what i feel to be an undercurrent of resentment wishing to resolve in catastrophes.

I had a look at wikipedia concerning the THC slowdown and the little ice age before feeling like to get to know what you would say after what seems like researches telling it might not be, let's say, as big as that... is this article tampered by the ''Climate change does not exist'' afficionados ?

Do you know of any source that is vulgarising on environment without that gilt that sours so many discourses, steaming my glasses.

Regards

Just wanting to find out what was the source for KSR's thinking in defining the ten forms of change in music and physics in the Memory of Whiteness?

A couple of decades ago I read KSR's story "A History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations". Much of it consists of a travelogue around Orkney, and in particular the neolithic village of Skara Brae. Ever since I've had this desire to visit the place, and now I finally did it.

It is hard to describe why I feel such a strong connection to those neolithic sites, but in a way it was like half-seeing the invention of civilization, a cultural revolution that brought about technological and ideological concepts that we now take for granted.

In any case, I'm not sure this is the proper forum for this, and I apologize if it is not, but I wanted to share this. I've put some pictures up (http://www.flickr.com/photos/ml42/tags/orkney/), and a blog post (n Portuguese) http://ml42.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/queen-mary-university-of-london-londr..., so people can have some idea of what I've seen and why it affected me this way.

I read with awe the description of the rain in D.C. in Forty Signs of Rain, a 2004 copyright book. I have the receipt from my purchase in May 2011 marking one of the more remarkable features. On Page 362 there is reference to Tropical Storm Sandy.(!?!)
An amazing prediction, on par if not surpassing Nostradamus's prediction of Hitler (Hisler). You only missed by a few miles.

As an appetiser to Shaman can II recommend 'Spirits of the Mothers' by Cristi Fernández Narvaíza? This pseudo-scientific book highlights the plight of our ancestors 15,000 years ago. The chapters skilfully alternate between a narrative followed by facts, figures and the author's conclusion. I read it in one sitting and wished other science based books used such style. I look forward to Shaman with this little book's knowledge in mind.

I need to contact Mr. Kim Stanley Robinson. It's urgent for me and I need help with finding his e-mail address at least, or any other method to contact him.
Thanks

Hi, my name is Greg. I've surfed the web through and couldn't find any trace of Kim Stanley Robinson, which as I know was published via your agency. The question is about translation his books into Russian and publishing them in Russia, but still I cannot find neither him, nor his lobbyists. If you can help me somehow, please respond via the e-mail.
Sincerely, Greg.

Hi, my name is Greg. I've surfed the web through and couldn't find any trace of Kim Stanley Robinson. The question is about translation his books into Russian and publishing them in Russia, but still I cannot find neither him, nor his lobbyists. If you can help me somehow, please respond.
Sincerely, Greg.

I heard a reviewer on NPR recommend 2312 as their best SF pick for 2012.

How right they were! I just finished the audiobook version and I cannot begin to express how amazing this book is.

The quality of writing, the vocabulary, the science (hard and social), the characters, the "scenery", the use of Lists and Extracts, the Quantum Walks... all conspire to weave an extraordinary tale.

This must sound a bit like a gushy fanboy, but I am 54 and have been reading SF since grade school. This is some of the best SF ever!

Thank you very much Mr. Robinson!!

Article includes comments from Kim:

Daring Mars Rover Landing Has High Stakes for NASA


by Leonard David, SPACE.com’s Space Insider Columnist

Date: 01 August 2012 Time: 11:44 AM ET

http://www.space.com/16847-mars-rover-curiosity-landing-high-stakes.html

I love the Red Mars trilogy and was re-reading it, when I came upon something that Jackie said in Blue Mars: she mentions that if they allow individual towns and cultures too much autonomy, they could end up with a place that practices (gasp) female genital mutilation.

I'm wondering why KSR singled out female genital mutilation, and didn't mention male genital mutilation? Non-consensual circumcision is practiced by Judaism, and earlier in Green Mars the character create the Dorsa Brevia document which unthinkingly enshrines the right to religious freedom, without any mention of how to protect young boys and girls from having their bodies mutilated.

If KSR were to write these books today, would he still have Jackie single out only *female* circumcision and make no mention of the plight of young boys in these same cultures?

Please, how can I contact Kim Stanley robinson?

I have been asking for a while now...

How does he do his research for the science in his books? They re so well researched, I;d love to know how.

I just finished Gretel Ehrlichs "This Cold Heaven" about her trips to northern Greenland and life among native people there. Climate, landscapes, vegetation and people are all evocative of the KSRs Mars books. The Inuit who (at the time of of writing - late 90s) were still doing subsistence hunting from dog sleds and kayaks trying to stave off a growing market economy, outboard engines and snowmobiles and worried about global warming....Good book! Wonder if KSR read it?

[quote=Naseem]Hi everybody!
I was recently reading the Aurora book (which, by the way, is AMAZING), and it was mentioning pretty early on that the ship in Aurora is 12 magnitudes smaller than Earth. Since it is hard for the human mind to fully conceptualize the size of our world, I was trying to use Google to figure out how small, exactly, is 12 magnitudes smaller than Earth. I couldnt find anything useful online, so I was wondering if somebody here could help me out with some comparison (My research lead me to believe that 12 magnitudes smaller than earth is the size of bacteria, which it awfully small for a inter-solar space ship).
Thanks! (btw thanks to Science Friday for recommending this book!)[/quote]
Lets look at it by volume.

The volume of the earth is 1.08*10^12 km. So I guess 12 orders of magnitude smaller would leave a volume of 1.08 km. That still seems a small for so many people but in bacteria sized.

Alan