Power tends to corrupt, said Lord Acton. There are always people who will get ahead by stomping their way up the ladder of life, and the devil take the hindmost. I suppose we could think about colonizing a planet and refusing to let any of the Bad Guys in, but even so, who’s going to do the choosing? Absolute power, Acton went on, tends to corrupt absolutely.

Coyotes are cool. They’re smarter than wolves, better at observational learning than dogs, and tend to survive even in places that are populated by humans. They’re also mean—their packs are small because they fight amongst each other. Finally, they can mate with wolves and dogs . . . maybe humans?

As a marine ecologist, I see the impending impact of climate change every day. The places I love will be (and some would say already have been) irrevocably altered by our changing climate. It still amazes me that anyone can continue to deny something as obvious as the changes that are occurring.

Family is great subject matter. So are, for that matter, adolescence and awkwardness. The working title for my next collection is Get in Trouble. Because that’s a type of story (and character) I’m eternally interested in.

I remember reading SF back in middle and high school that speculated about the future of art. Nothing I read in those stories (I recall one had an olfactory symphony, for instance) would have prepared me for slash fanvids or World of Warcraft machinima sagas or custom My Little Ponies done up as everything from Marilyn Monroe to Johnny Depp.

The culture of the coyotes feels a lot more interesting to me than dog-level violence or the mechanics of transformation. Especially in the way romance in America can blur the borders that insulate a subculture. Like the first time Sarah came to one of my Protestant family’s witch burnings.

The Age of Big Data is upon us, and the externalization of our inner life and the outsourcing of our mental processes to technology are long-term trends. Do these trends free us to be more creative, more caring, more human? Or do they make us more dependent, more isolated, less human? Different temperaments and vantage points will lead us to give different answers.

I grew up Mormon in Utah, so I was part of a fairly intensive religion in a state where it was the dominant cultural influence. It thought of itself as a day-to-day religion more than a Sunday religion, and so infected a good part of one’s other activities. Now I’m an excommunicated Mormon and am fairly far outside of it, but am still fascinated not only with religion but with the ways community forms around religious belief.

Any story has an agenda, a point of view. And a folk tale/fairy tale has a very strong one, molded over centuries. After Perrault made the fairy tale into a literary form, writers used stories in this genre to advance what they saw as good manners and a proper way of life. The stories become quite elegant even when compared to the Grimms’ tales, which were cleaned up for 19th century consumption.

The idea was not so much virtual reality, but augmented reality. I’ve been really intrigued by adding a pair of goggles that overlay digital data over existing objects in the real world (virtual reality inside out, so to speak). You can see the effect using the app AcrossAir for the iPhone. What is more interesting to me is what we’ll do when we gamify augmented reality.