Banks Knows What Caused His Cancer
As we walk to the door, Banks pulls one final, left-field surprise. "Do you know that I know what caused the cancer?" I think I pull a face like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. "Cosmic ray," he says. "I won't brook any contradiction; it was a high-energy particle. A star exploded hundreds or thousands of years ago and ever since there's been a cosmic ray – a bad-magic bullet with my name on it, to quote Ken – heading towards the moment where it hit one of my cells and mutated it. That's an SF author's way to bow out; none of this banal transcription error stuff." Then the moment comes that I was dreading … but he says "See you soon" instead.
Notes:
Claims it was a "cosmic ray." A poetic notion.
Folksonomies: meaning chance scale
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Concepts:
Macaulay Culkin (0.945151): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc | yago | musicBrainz
Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (0.866013): dbpedia | freebase
Home Alone (0.836066): dbpedia
Iain Banks: the final interview