On every world there are a few who know [that the shift of the operating principles of the universe] is going to happen. They are dismissed as kooks, because when rationalism is in the ascendant, everybody knows that magic is hokum. Conversely, when magic rules, everybody knows that cause-and-effect physics is unreliable in a universe that operates on the basis of focused will.

The idea came to me on a NY (not KY) interstate, musing on the wide, wooded medians as a sort of created wilderness. I imagined a campfire and even “saw” the bears sitting around it. The story itself is your standard Southern old-timers’ nostalgia tale, with old tires instead of corn bread and sorghum as the icons of tradition.

Several months after writing “Apotheosis,” I looked at it again. And suddenly I realized that it was a completely blatant response to Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” I had read that story as a teenager and loved it, but I had probably taken it a bit more literally than I was meant to, because my first reaction was, “Why are you walking away? GET A GUN AND BREAK THAT KID OUT OF THERE.” Of course, that’s not the story Le Guin was trying to write. But it ended up being the story that I did.

Meaningful science fiction stories are really about the human condition, or so I’ve been told enough times that I’ve begun to believe it. We’re a pretty self-centered species at a fundamental level, so a story that deals only with an extremely “alien” entity would not be very satisfying to our need for stories. At the core of any story, there has to be a human soul, regardless of how dressed up it is as “other.”

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.