00:00I
00:25want to buy a new bike. And then the rest, I want to go to Japan. I don't know if I'm
00:32going to be allowed to go to Japan for a long time, whether I have the freedom, but I'd
00:38love to go back. I used to live there, so I'd love to go back there on a long trip.
00:43I couldn't make a speech that didn't reference the predicament that we find ourselves in
00:48and the book is not exactly about climate change, but implied in a view of the earth
00:56is the fact of human-made climate change. And so I think I wanted to reference it in
01:05the speech.
01:06I did it by mistake and I read what I'd written and I thought, you know, this has something
01:10that the other things I'm working on don't have. It has a kind of electricity, a sort
01:16of energy and a sense of reality to me and a sense of sincerity. So I thought, okay,
01:23I'm going to try it. I'm just going to have to do it well enough to justify my right to
01:31write about something like space. I mean, I appreciate that authors are always writing
01:35about things they don't know about, but this just felt like quite a leap.
01:39I was under no pressure in any direction from my publisher. I've always been given
01:46complete creative freedom and nobody said, could you make it a bit longer? Nobody. So
01:57I didn't really think about its size. It was a longer novel and I just kind of kept cutting
02:02and cutting. And that seemed to be, because it takes place over one day, that seemed to
02:08be the right kind of size for the book.
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