This was originally a short I’d intended to include in a climate change anthology that explored more tangible, localized impact rather than the distant/impossible macro-disaster approach that ends up being the focus of a lot of media. And then the world started catching up to the stories being written and it somehow felt less poignant and more “news at eleven.” So “12th St. Pirates” takes from existing examples of apartheid and classism and places them in a climate justice framework, positing that we are going to take our societal ills into a climate altered future. As our climate situation worsens, there are segments of society that will choose to see walls as a fix.

I’ve seen lots of Baba Yaga retellings and modernizations—and don’t get me wrong, the old witch is fascinating, deserving of every ounce of attention she gets. For this story, though, I wanted to cast one of the figures of Slavic folklore I don’t see revisited nearly as often: Poludnitsa (also known as the Noon Witch, or Lady Midday). Pulling from my own experiences, I threw in some teenage angst, some intergenerational dissonance, and a Burning Man–esque desert setting that’s going to be make or break for our modern Noon Witch.

I love time travel stories, and I always have. Not just time travel stories, but time-bending stories, time-jumping stories, any kind of time-futzing, I’m there for it. The novel I’m writing now is called Big Time. It’s a time-manipulation piece, and it had me doing a lot of research on theories and mechanisms of time travel. I think this story came from that work. So it’s a bit of a subsidiary to the novel I’m working on—although it’s a very, very different piece, both in plot and tone. In terms of inspiration, Back To The Future is an obvious one; anything where you’ve got a hero, especially a self-confident, clever kid, traveling through time, you’re in BTTF territory.

The germ of this story was a little flight of fancy I had one day, involving a young dragon that went into a cave and then grew so much that it couldn’t get out. Then I realized it fit into a series of stories I’ve been writing off and on for (eek) fifteen years now. This is the fourth to be published, after “Wizard’s Six,” “Dragon’s Teeth,” and “Chisel and Chime.” Several more are in progress. The twin guideposts for all of them are Earthsea and Viriconium.

In stories like this one, particularly when the central conflict is built around a pandemic or climate change, happy endings often come in the form of restoring the status quo—we win by overcoming the new threat and setting things back the way they were. In reality, this thinking doesn’t work for climate change because “the way things were” is what got us into this mess in the first place. The only way we win now is by embracing radical change: in ourselves, our behaviour and our society. I wanted to write a story that made the metaphor literal.