This is where the “strange effect” of fiction is really quite powerful. Being able to sympathize with people completely unlike ourselves helps open our minds to what others in the real world are going through. I try to remember this when I find myself judging people whose ambitions have lead them astray. We have a political and corporate climate right now that makes it easy to lose sympathy for people. There are some folks out there who are reviled by many, and I think it would break our hearts to learn how much some of them loathe themselves.

True fact: when I first read Orwell’s 1984 (back when I was a tiny!Merc and didn’t quite get a lot of the political commentary), I was miffed that things like the Ministry of Truth and the Ministry of Love were not literal. Tiny!Merc was outraged that these names were, in fact, hiding something quite different. When I grew older and eventually got the irony, it really became all that much scarier. Naming something that has connotations of positive concepts when the thing is really fucking terrifying is a mind game all its own.

When I was a kid, I remember thinking there was no way for me to know if the world existed billions of years before me, or if it came into being the day I was born, and all the rest was just a very old scenography, with all the people coming along with it, complete with fake memories. That was my first taste of solipsism, and a part of me still thinks I was not far off. As a matter of fact . . . what is the difference between the two? From my point of view, the world’s past exists only if I exist. So, in a way, it didn’t exist before I was born.

When I was travelling into a library in Manchester researching the Napoleonic Wars for Dream Paris, it occurred to me that I was living on the edge of a city that had gone through these changes in the nineteenth century and I’d not been writing about it. Since then, it seems like I’ve walked the length and breadth of the city’s streets thinking about fantasy stories. I’ve filled Evernote with notes and pictures. Now I just need the characters to populate those backdrops . . .

 I think this is probably the closest to “hard” science fiction of any story I’ve written. As I said above, my understanding of the physics here is pretty spotty, so my apologies to any scientists who spot something wrong! And a fun personal fact that made it into this story: my deep and hopefully irrational fear of losing my wedding ring.

Reconciliation, to me, in its meaning of “to bring back together,” implies that all parties have openly communicated with each other to restore relations. It implies a kind of forgiveness, and releasing each other from the past. I imagine some people will see a relationship between mother and daughter worth salvaging. I do not subscribe to the notion that it is necessary, or even desirable, to tidy up one’s relationship to one’s parents according to common wisdom of what that relationship should be.

Sometimes readers want to hear that a story is autobiographical, sometimes (understandably) they don’t; and sometimes they’d really rather have the writer shut up and write more stories—which is probably what he should indeed do. But since you ask and since it’s important to me where stories come from, I should go ahead and say that I lived in a magical village just like the one in “Ink” when I was David’s age. By “magical,” I don’t mean just the feeling of it; I mean literal events.

“An Inflexible Truth” grew out of my love for the conspiracy thriller genre—especially those classics from the 1970s, with an intrepid hero who gets wind of systemic corruption and undertakes to expose it. There’s an implicit, compelling momentum to that kind of tale, as the protagonist’s knowledge of the world’s hidden evil grows. But I also find it psychologically interesting, because the protagonist is usually so isolated and outnumbered by a hidden reality he doesn’t quite grasp.

It may be worth mentioning here that the idea from the story came from a real incident. After the 1988 World Fantasy Convention in London, I took the train up to Edinburgh, which is one of my favorite cities, and stayed there for a week. One day I was hiking by myself on Arthur’s Seat and heard someone ask, “Are you all right?” When I turned, I found a cop next to me. He and his partner patrolled the base of the park, and when they saw a woman alone, he left the patrol car to climb up and assess the situation.

In the case of stories like “Tongue,” I hope to shock readers by presenting a real world issue that’s so common, so routine, and yet so horrific, that it hopefully makes supernatural horrors pale in comparison. At the same time, “Tongue” is a science fiction story, because the technology that exists to make Revathi possible (in the form she is when the story opens) doesn’t actually exist yet. It’s an attempt to write SF that’s about real world problems, as against “first world” problems like most SF seems to be historically.