An animal can be brutal; there’s no moral judgment to the concept. It takes a thinking creature to be cruel.

my dad is a steam train enthusiast, so I grew up in an atmosphere of love for a bygone age and its technology. But I think mainly it was Turner’s painting of the Fighting Temeraire, the old warship from the Battle of Trafalgar being tugged off to be broken up. I was thinking about nostalgia and the pain of losing familiar things. But I was also thinking about the way the past survives in artifacts and ideas. The ship survives in the painting and in photographs of the painting.

Writing about, and thinking about, superhero media has made me very sensitive to the underlying levels of hypocrisy in a lot of the Marvel/DC runs—like, take the Daredevil series on Netflix. Daredevil is all “but I don’t kill people zomg!” while, you know, throwing enemies into walls and off stairwells and generally inflicting massive head trauma on so. many. people. Physical violence leaves damages; when I see the “heroes” reacting hyperviolently and then claiming they are doing good, it bothers me.

My daughter said, “I used to always wish that I’d find a magical portal or whatever, but then I started wondering what happened after. How do you have a normal life after you cut off a monster’s head and become Empress? It would make it very hard to do your social studies homework, I think. And also, since when is being eleven any indication of leadership qualities? That just seems like a bad policy.” Her brother is, after all, eleven.

The stories that generally make it into history involve winners and successes. We don’t read, and often don’t even know, about the explorers who didn’t make it—who set out to sea and got lost and drowned. Similarly, when it comes to scientific discoveries and suchlike. But we also know that, for every Columbus and Newton, there are a lot of other equally brave and stupidly arrogant people who set out to prove something who were forgotten.

I drew on my history writing Mythos and Weird fiction, where things often start off fairly normal and then go abysmally awry, to create that sense of disorientation and “what’s real?” But in the end, this story is probably the most classically SF story I’ve ever written, up to and including riffing on Robert Silverberg.

As a kid, I wanted very much to believe in the supernatural. I sought evidence for it all around me, because there was always this lingering sense of “is this really it?” As I grew older, as life got harder and as my family struggled to make it in tough times, my wonder at the universe seemed to diminish. I took refuge in the idea that Bigfoot might live in the woods behind my house.

I do love this far future world, but I haven’t written any other stories in it. It’s really an extension of my exploration of where we go, once we can manipulate our genes and achieve immortality. Is death the dividing line between Human and Non-human? I wonder about that.

There’s something about spiders that creeps certain people out, that’s for starters. I doubt the story will ever lose that angle. The story is also told in a sort of fairy tale mode, albeit a dark one, and that might offer some staying power. And the political underpinnings seem to point out a certain insect fear and cold predation that is the heart of politics these days and doesn’t look like it’ll be changing any time soon.

I had no particular message in mind when I wrote this one. I separate stories from yarns and yarns from throwaway bits of business; this is just one of the many that sprouted from an initial situation, with no particular authorial plan regarding destination.