A very belated final news post on material that surfaced the internet after Kim Stanley Robinson's visit to Australia in late August-early September!

In the Melbourne Writers Festival, writer and editor Lucy Sussex interviewed Kim Stanley Robinson as part of Australian Brodcasting Corporation's Big Ideas series. Stan discusses his novels, his ideas, his politics, his child love of Francis Drake's exloprations that inspired the award-winning short story "Black Air", his love of the Sierras that inspired the Mars novels, his love of Virginia Woolf and Olaf Stapledon, Galileo's character and time-travelling as a storytelling device that can stand in for psychology and memory, and much more. This excellent interview is available in video (mp4 & wmv) and audio, and is embedded below.

And some last Aussiecon 4 articles:

AusLit, as part of their series of articles on the Worldcon, also did a review article with all the technical issues discussed on the panel The Race To The Red Planet, with Kim Stanley Robinson, David D. Levine and Jim Benford. A video featuring part of the panel (atomic-powered rockets to Mars and space elevators) surfaced on YouTube; audio quality is very bad, but you can see it here (originated from this blog).

Blogger and SF writer Graham Clements posted reviews on all the Climate Change panels of the convention -- Stan of course participated in nearly all of them. Blog posts part 1 and part 2 (which includes an account of Gregory Benford's panel with some very interesting technical details on geoengineering). Excerpts:

He disagreed with the concept of sustainable development, which he thought was humanity saying: let’s just continue to live like we have, but get away with it.
He has a garden and solar panels.
He wishes they had a preferential voting system in the US so environmental parties would get a look in at the elections.
He mentioned that one-third of humanity's food comes from the oceans, but greenhouse gases are raising its PH level which might kill the bottom of the food chain.

He believes it is still possible to get to a carbon neutral state, but it would take some severe action. Nuclear power has to be used as a bridging technology. Genetic engineering might also be part of the solution, for example, rice that can survive two month floods instead of the previous two week floods. He's against notions of purity, i.e., that the solution has to be pure and contain no nuclear power, no genetic engineering.

---

Keep checking the Calendar on the left -- next event with KSR is a NASA-sponsored talk on November 9th (in two days!) in Irvine, California, on human space flight and the public.

(Photo from ABC.)