Many of your books, 2312 included, are known for describing realistic, possible, and complex worlds. You address issues as diverse as science, art, psychology, and economics. One of the ways that you add detail in 2312 is by separating chapters of plot with manufactured lists or fragments of primary documents. How do you prepare for writing a novel like 2312? What is your research process like?

Because I have been working in a story space that could be described as "the solar system in the next few centuries" from the beginning of my career, now about 35 years ago, I've amassed a good library of books I can turn to when I need to research things. The planetary and scientific texts are just a part of it, the rest being books about various social sciences, political and utopian thinking, design and the like. These days I also sometimes rely on my own previous novels, both for ideas to re-examine, and for leads back into my research materials.

All this has been greatly augmented by the appearance of the Internet and its ever-expanding store of information. I still like a good book for getting a solid sense of a subject, but the internet is becoming invaluable for quickly looking things up, exploring topics, and so on.

It's also true that I have been reading the periodical Science News all along, and it has an uncanny way of publishing articles that pertain to my current project, such that by the end of any novel I have piled up a stack of issues, opened to the articles I am using.

In the case of 2312, deciding to use John Dos Passos's format from his great U.S.A. trilogy gave me a structure that required me to range widely, and think about as many elements of society 300 years from now as I could, and include something in my lists or extracts about how they might help create the lived feeling of the time.

How did you decide which fictitious lists to make? Which documents or extracts do you think would be helpful in describing our present world?

I started keeping lists of lists, in effect, so that I could judge which kinds of topics should be included. Most of them provide some kind of expansion or context or explanation of the science fictional new things the story was introducing in its plots. For instance in the book the characters who live in space have to return to Earth about one year in any seven or so, to stay healthy; this is a statistical observation without a clear cause yet identified, so rather than slow the story to have characters or narrator discuss this, in one of the extract passages the whole thing could be laid out as essential information gathered in small pieces of crucial information from different sources (like reading online can sometimes be) and this turned into a kind of prose poem.

As for which would be helpful in describing our world, I guess the ones about economics and climate change on Earth. The entire situation in 2312 is basically a projection of our current situation into the solar system 300 years from now, so it functions as a kind of surrealism or symbolist metaphor or heroic simile. But some elements are more direct representations than others.