I wrote this story as a present for a dear friend. It is about their stuffed fox, who is a proper and upright gentleman and would never stoop to any sort of trickery.

The inspiration for “NeuNet” is actually alluded to directly in the story. I watched a YouTube video (now lost) that suggested that using humans as batteries as in the movie The Matrix would be inefficient; using them as computers would be a far more useful proposition. That idea wriggled around in my brain for a while, until finally bursting out of its chrysalis when I saw the call for submissions.

One of my friends, while reading this story, made a comment about my ability to come up with so many fantasy names. I was all lol, I can’t claim credit. The name of the Jaani gods are the equivalent Nepali words for animals. For example: Biralo—cat, Chitwa—cheetah, Mayur—peacock, Sarpa—snake. Janawar—animal. At one point of my writing journey, I gave myself permission to use Nepali in my fiction; after all, my thoughts, my linguistic understanding of the world, include Nepali so of course my creative lexicon will reflect that.

The story started as a lighthearted writing exercise because I thought it would be fun technical challenge to try and write a story about the multiverse collapsing since the main character slips through multiple realities. I thought it would just be an excuse to allude to a whole multiverse of alternate universes and to use my most delicious prose. Then I wrote the first few paragraphs and realized that this was a love story, a tragedy, and that it was far less lighthearted than I thought it was going to be.

I believe the initial idea came to me after I watched a video on how Singapore imports and dredges sand to shore up its land mass, spawning illegal dredging operations and disputes with neighboring countries. As climate change worsens, these battles for every resource—even sand—will increase. Most Americans still think of climate change as a problem happening somewhere else or in the future, so I thought, why not bring this already existing dystopian climate reality back home?

I’m fascinated by the process of translation from one language to another. I’m fascinated by how a foreign language might have the perfect word for something that has no single word in one’s native tongue (like the Japanese word “komorebi,” which means “sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees” or the German word “schadenfreude”—both words which have no single-word equivalents in English).

This story is based on a dream I had in spring 2019. A wild, sad dream, where I was desperately trying to jump to the moon. And on the jump, I saw these fantastic colors all around me. Purples and pinks streaking past me. And I remember waking up literally feeling like I was falling. Like I was being pulled into the Earth. It was terrifying and so intense. So naturally, I tried to recreate it with words.

I think that as I’ve developed as a writer, I’ve gained three main tools. The first is faith that I’m eventually going to get to the end, because I usually do, even if I have no idea how and it really doesn’t look like I will. The second is perseverance (rejections, blah blah). The third is actually knowing when to give up on something. I think that’s the real paradox of being a writer—you have to have so much blind faith and perseverance…

I had generated a flash piece based on the title, which was the list of tourist brochure entries that made it more or less intact, albeit totally reordered, into the final story. I realized that, although that list tells a story of its own, it isn’t one with the emotional impact I wanted, which led me to go back and imagine what kind of person might read such a brochure and visit these places. Once I had Mer in mind, I wrote his scenes out of order.

I wrote this story at Clarion West, where one of our instructors was the Australian editor Jonathan Strahan. I’d grown up in Australia, so I got it in my head that I’d write an Australia story for him. I’d also been tempted to have a go at a classic space survival kind of plot, and the two ideas fused when I hit on the parallel between central Australia and Mars—two red, arid landscapes that, to an outsider, don’t seem capable of supporting life. That image was really important at the beginning.