Wired.com presents the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr-Kirtley.

Hello and welcome to episode 145 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is British author casual Ishiguro.

He won the Booker Prize for his 1989 novel The Remains of the Day, which was turned into a feature film starring

Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.

In 2005, Ishiguro published a dystopian science fiction novel called Never Let Me Go,

which was adapted into a feature film starring

Kiran Knightley and Andrew Garfield with a screenplay by Alex Garland.

Isherro's new book is a fantasy novel called The Buried Giant.

And now here's our interview with

casual wishiguro. All right, so we're here with casual isiguro. Welcome to the

show. Well, it's very nice to be here. Thank you very much. Okay, and so your new book is called The Berry Giant.

So how did the idea for this book first come about?

Oh, I have to go a long, long way back for that.

So I can remember telling an audience back in 2001 about a book I was working on, which is very like this one.

But I didn't really, I couldn't really figure out the setting even the genre until much later but I knew for

a long time I wanted to write a story about a society that was suffering from a kind of collective amnesia, not dementia or anything

like that or Alzheimer's, some kind of very selective amnesia so that whenever anyone try to remember things around a certain area, certain kind of topic, everyone would kind of blank out.

So that... everyone would kind of blank out.

So that I was playing around with possible settings,

the possible locations to play out this idea for a number of years.

I suppose what they behind that was that I wanted to ask this question,

...