“Over a Long Time Ago” is part of a series of short stories centered on an interstellar penal colony called Amends. In the series chronology it’s the second story, though I wrote it next to last. The story’s title is a line from a great Steely Dan song, “Pretzel Logic,” this wonky blues ballad about time travel. There’s this sad feeling of inevitability to the song that I hope to evoke in readers, which is a totally appropriate emotional tone.

I’ve worked some bad jobs before. I figure we all have. So it came from that, to a degree.

My academic background is in psychology, and when I was trying to get this story to come together I started reading a bunch of articles on attention, working memory, language acquisition, and more generally how we learn new skills and information. As I was researching, I got it in my head that what I really wanted was to somehow train people to do something that, cognitively, we simply do not do.

Speculative fiction has a long history of engaging with aliens from other worlds. But we have fellow Earthlings all around us and research is indicating that the Western modern gaze has missed crucial things about other species: that they feel, they communicate, sometimes in such sophisticated ways (as in the case of cetaceans) that we can’t figure it out.

For years now, I’ve been trying to work through my despair about climate catastrophe and what looks to me like the onrushing extinction both of our species and many others. How do we keep going in the face of annihilation? (Some people are more optimistic about all of this than I am, and I hope they’re right.)

My stories originate from those places I don’t expect them to be born. They also come at the time I don’t want them to—like when I’m about to finally attempt an eight-hour sleep. And this story is not an exception. I have always wanted to write a story with a blend of my culture—the Yoruba culture—its myths and legends, but every attempt at this had always been unrealistic.

I was very interested in the horrifying aspects of time as a menacing, material force—something that could eat you. But I ultimately became much more interested in the world in which time might function this way: the addictive substances that might be used to pacify kids who can “see” the future.

I was literally invited to six weddings in 2022, and the one I attended in Rhode Island was so lovely, I had to channel it into writing on the train back (I have stories based on some of the other weddings too.) Some of the emotional thrusts are based on my own experience, but I’ll let you guess which.

I’ve been blessed with lots of elders in my life, and as a result I tend to overestimate how long people in general tend to live. But there are weird actuarial patterns—if you can make it to certain ages, you’re likely to make it farther—and that fascinated me, especially as I look at my loved ones with hope and trepidation.

I play the guitar badly, some other instruments even more badly, and I like to get out into the woods and hike. There’s nothing like just putting miles under your feet to clear your head and get you ready to write.