With this story, I actually knew the title before anything else. I was watching some nature documentary about elephants, and the phrase “elephants’ crematorium” sprang into my head. While I knew that elephants’ graveyards aren’t actually real, that idea stuck with me and began percolating. The rest of the story came as I developed just why this group of elephants would be self-immolating, and then the parallel human aspects came from that.

 This one’s based on a feeling that I sometimes get about fantasy: that sometimes it’s an escape in all the wrong ways. Please don’t think I’m saying I’m above it. I wrote a six-volume series of middle-grade portal fantasy. But every once in a while, the nagging question comes: Are these stories, with their easily identifiable villains and ultimately solvable problems, a denial of the world as it is, an abdication of the sad truth? That we are watching evil be defeated while our civilization is being nibbled by ducks?

I found middle school to be one of the most awful experiences of my life, so I guess it’s not surprising that I eventually got around to exploring middle school in a story. The SF aspect of the story was something that had been sitting in my idea file for a while, but I couldn’t figure out how to turn it into a story. Lately I’ve written a few young adult and middle grade books, and that felt like the right setting.

In some ways, this story’s a response to how our society puts so much emphasis on romantic attachments, how it ignores the idea that platonic relationships can carry the same amount of importance. This tunnel vision has been instrumental in creating lonely people—so many adults find themselves suddenly starved of affection because all they do is work and go home to family.

I think a lot about cycles of time and arrows of time, two dominant models of time that have been important not just in the history of philosophy and science, but also in how we consider and come to terms with our own mortality. It is sometimes said that taking the long view is depressing—since in the long term, all of us will be dead. But for this story, I wanted to see if it’s possible to go the other way.

I read a little bit of Angela Carter and Lyudmila Petrushevskaya while working on “Al-Kahf,” The Bloody Chamber and There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby, so many of the structural and stylistic decisions I made in my own story were influenced by those authors. I’m a fan of Carter’s detail. Her writing is rich and dense, and I adore her attention to language.

Take memories, for instance. They’re imperfect and fleeting, and yet we build so much of our sense of self upon them. “I am the person today who remembers the person I was yesterday.” So if you forget a particular event, are you a different person than the one who experienced it? You almost certainly remember it differently than it actually happened. Our brains are incredible at filling in details to make our memories more believable.

Kali was actually created out of body parts of different Hindu gods. They were unable to defeat a powerful demon themselves, so they each contributed a body part, which came with that god’s greatest power or weapon, and created Kali. But they hadn’t anticipated how powerful she would be now that she had all their powers (duh). She was a wrecking ball. An unstoppable force of destruction.

In our society, we valorize dissent. We’re literally taught in school that if one man refuses to knuckle under, then the entire world can change. That’s also a key element of so many fantasy stories. But it’s just not true. Oftentimes, you lose. The problem is, you don’t know what’s going to happen. You don’t know if you’ll win or lose. You don’t know what courage is. So it’s impossible to know, ahead of time, what’s the right thing to do.

I’m a psycholinguist who’s also a first language speaker of a language (Hungarian) that often defies received wisdom about “language universals.” A lot of “facts which are true of all languages” simply do not hold for Hungarian. I am less of an expert about emotions, but my knowledge of languages has in general made me skeptical of claims of cognitive universals. All the research that I mention in the story is real.