“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.)