This is a story about the commodification of absolutely everything. It portrays a future world where culture, religion, and people themselves are consumer goods bought and sold on the open market. No one in the story thinks they are living in a dystopia; they cheerfully collaborate and celebrate their own commodification — until they can’t any more.

I tried to write about Váli for the first time in my junior year of college, right after my first few short stories had been published. It was not a success. I don’t know why I tried again in 2010, during a painful drought in my writing life — by the time I finished the story in December of that year, it was the first piece of fiction I had managed to complete since early 2008 — but this time it took. To date, it’s still my only successful attempt at Norse myth in fiction.

In a way, I had the inspiration for this story far before I ever thought about writing. It came from the idea of the music of the spheres — the idea that the movements of the moon and planets have their own tones or harmonies that are based on the proportions of their orbits. I first learned of the concept studying Shakespeare in high school, but it’s an idea that has fascinated me whenever I’ve come across it.

The problem is that the dichotomy is false; “real world events” are themselves fictions. I don’t mean that in either the solipsist or conspiracy-theorist senses; I just mean that the true reality of events is always too big to be known and ends up getting folded into simplified cartoon narratives. I do think it’s good for writers to try and complicate that when they can. Writers, unlike gen pop, have the advantage of already knowing themselves to be liars.

I don’t recall having problems with it once I realized that what I thought were two different stories was one story. The “land” story was nearly complete; the “undersea” story was unfinished. When I saw they were separate parts of the same story, all I had to do was figure out how to combine them — where and how they should interlock with each other. And doing that enabled me to see how they both should end.

I was in a store one day and I heard a parent paged for a lost child, which somehow got me imagining a childless person who hears herself paged, and shows up, and there’s this kid there, insisting that he’s hers. What if, instead of swapping a fairy changeling for a human child, the fairy child just showed up and insisted that he’d been your child all along? I poked at that a little but I couldn’t quite get it to work as the light, humorous story I’d initially imagined.

Nearly half the world’s population live on less than $2.50 a day. That’s three billion people locked out of a better life, for starters. I’m not one of them — I grew up lower middle class and am a big fan of that particular strata of society. Middle class is all about having enough (whether we recognize such privilege and advantage for what it is or not), but “having enough” does not fit the capitalist ideology of limitless, relentless expansion. I believe Western middle class society is currently being eroded.

The overarching story is that of Kaslo, an immensely competent man in his natural habitat, who has to learn how to cope with a sudden shift to a very dangerous environment in which his skills are not much use. By contrast, there’s also Obron, who was a bit of a ninny in the old universe but who is becoming a genuine power in the new. The theme there is that we are all creatures of our environments,

Gender identity, for many of us, is not binary. It’s pleasantly hazy, or can be pleasant, and should be. It’s slippery. Today there’s a growing consciousness of this inherent fluidity. There are pockets where the words “male” and “female” are obsolete, even offensive. Where L, G, B, T, Q, and Z are beginning to lose their meaning. But these pockets are few and far between

I didn’t want to do a story where magic was a normal part of the world or something available to the protagonists. So I went with the classic “portal world” situation, and this is just the setting that came to me. What struck me on re-reading the story long after it was written is that, despite the fantastical setting, and despite John’s admonition, it feels like a science fiction story.