Rural isolation lends itself to clandestine activities; so does Nevada’s laissez-faire brand of rugged individualism. Were I writing the story now, I’d have to explain why Welly’s selling pot instead of meth.

The reason I am not depressed when I look around and see only selfish behavior. I don’t want to hurt you or anyone else because it would hurt me to do so. I think it’s better than altruism.

Some of the more intelligent speculations about their silence are in the story, shortly before the Sayings of the Elder: that they don’t speak because they are listening; because they are hiding something.

This society has eradicated illness, and most people, of course, see that as a good thing. But the more you fix things, the more you have to watch to make sure they don’t start falling apart again.

I became a history major just after Vietnam to understand why humans went to war in the first place. I never really did figure that out, but it led to a lifelong obsession.

Where is the sacrifice in a martyr who believes he’ll live eternally in paradise? I was trying to think about the idea of true martyrdom—the sacrifice of not just your life, but of the hope for an afterlife.

Halfway through writing “Ej-es,” I emailed Janis Ian to tell her that I had turned her ballad of love and longing into a story about a retro-virus in the brain. She emailed back, “How did you know?”

I wanted the structure of the story to mimic the time-jumps that Hwang endures over and over again, in order to evoke at least a ghost of that instability, that sense of unease. I also had some ideas that I wasn’t sure how to make use of individually.

We’re already seeing the emergence of fringe groups who call themselves Otherkin, or therianthropes, or parahumanists. But, I think the point is, there are humans who do not see themselves as humans.

By placing the story in India, I was hoping to do two things. First, I wanted to evoke a near-future, fairly plausible world, which I hoped would heighten the emotional realism of what is, admittedly, a not-very-plausible premise. The other idea I had was that by setting it in India, which is, of course, a major outsourcing center in our real world, the story might be able to explore some of the socio-economic and psychological consequences of exporting our crappiest jobs to people on the other side of the world, to wonder a little bit about the limits of outsourcing.