A great deal of what I like about this story is what isn’t there. It is meant to be mystical and elegiac, which is life, as I understand it. I don’t know how Lena lost her place in the strange world that begins this story, but I know that poetry sustains that world, and it will die if it doesn’t regain its Muse, its inspiration.

Take away those who hold a major belief system and yes, society alters. Those left behind have their beliefs shaken. Those transported greet a new world, and though somewhat reassured, have a hard time and many questions. It’s a huge reset.

When I encountered JANE EYRE again in graduate school, I was in for a bit of a shock. This was not the dull, safe story I remembered. It was a novel out of Victorian nightmare, clawing against the constraints of its historical period. And this time it was clearly, to my eyes, a fantasy novel: It features a young Orphan With A Destiny adventuring across a landscape infused with fairy-tale imagery.

I am very aware of the story clock that ticks in the background of all fiction. The shorter the story, the faster the clock ticks.

One book I read as a kid claimed that when knights traveled east to attack Jerusalem during the Crusades, they sometimes got so hot that their sweat filled up their armor, drowning them. That was still fresh in my mind, so when John suggested I write a power armor story, I got the idea of a critical flaw in someone’s otherwise invincible armor that would cause the suit to fill with fluid, drowning them.

I’m happy to put things out on the street, give them away, whatever, because they’re only things. My mother came from a large family that lived in a great big house, and no matter where we lived, she always spoke of that as “home.” She and her sisters fought bitterly for possession of certain treasured objects.

I went for a walk recently through an unfamiliar neighborhood, and I thought of Amiyachi and Aihuowu. Even just a short distance away people live very differently than I do, and despite being neighbors we don’t know anything of each other. Was there an experience like that for you, before you wrote about Amiyachi and Aihuowu or after? Do you think that there are summer and winter people, or neighbors who live on different time?

So the idea came first, and the science was only secondary. The truth is, apart from the hard SF writers, much of what we call science fiction is fantasy. As far as we know, Faster Than Light travel is impossible, hyperspace is pure speculation, and traveling through a black hole will only get you squashed. (This holds with my current theory that physicists are fiction writers with calculators.) So the “magnetic field disaster” of my story is a device used to give credibility to a fancy.

This story is set in my far-future space-opera-ish Ten Thousand Worlds, a civilization extending up and down our arm of the galaxy. I’ve probably written close to a million words in various novels and short stories set in this universe, all of them at about the time that the big change from rationalism to sympathetic association (magic) is about to happen. Readers who find the setting interesting might visit my webpage and read the excerpts from other works set on Old Earth under the Archonate, as well as others of the Ten Thousand Worlds.