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.

Thank you. I love the ocean. I’m never so happy as when I’m by a large body of salt water. I’ve snorkeled and scubaed and was part of a four-year marine chemistry program in high school. So oceans have always been a place of fascination and love for me. I really wish there were an ocean-oriented Launchpad-type program for SFF writers.

The keys to collaboration are to agree beforehand on what kind of project you’re doing and then understand that the point is that it will come out differently than it would have if you’d done it by yourself.

Johnny Appleseed is a character that (historically) most people think of as a naturalist, as someone in touch with nature, and yet his story is one of invasion, of taking these plants that settlers wanted and spreading them, so in that, he’s very much a tool of colonization, of Manifest Destiny.

I’ve been fascinated by cryonics since I was a kid, when I first learned of it in Madeleine L’Engle’s book A Ring of Endless Light. That fascination was rekindled by an episode of This American Life several years ago, called “Mistakes Were Made,” which covered the story of a California cryonics pioneer who found himself stuck maintaining several “patients” on his own when the early foundation failed.

Daya has completely internalized that colorism and misogyny, and I hope that’s clear to readers! She’s not light-skinned, so from her point of view she must be plain. How she actually looks is beside the point. Similarly, the mercy she represents is coerced—if you don’t question the underlying assumptions, Feminine Virtue (TM) is a girl’s only acceptable alternative to being light-skinned.

I think all fiction is political, in that all fiction argues for a vision of what the world is and how it works and what is good and what is bad. I think that’s basically the essence of politics, competing definitions of the Good and the nature of the human experience. You can write a story with the aim of creating only sensation and aesthetic pleasure in the reader, but even doing that, you must make implicit statements about the world.

High school wasn’t entirely torturous for me (it was certainly better than middle school, anyway) but saying it was some high point in my life or something I miss would also be a considerable stretch. There are differences between B and Teenage Me, of course, and not just the obvious ones like (spoilers!) I never came back from the dead.

I think in this case I’m trying to make the point that environmental degradation ultimately degrades us. If we stop caring, not just about the wholesomeness of our physical environment and the preservation of the natural world, but about the education and quality of life of all levels of our citizens, as a civilization we haven’t a lot to look forward to.