There’s something about spiders that creeps certain people out, that’s for starters. I doubt the story will ever lose that angle. The story is also told in a sort of fairy tale mode, albeit a dark one, and that might offer some staying power. And the political underpinnings seem to point out a certain insect fear and cold predation that is the heart of politics these days and doesn’t look like it’ll be changing any time soon.

I had no particular message in mind when I wrote this one. I separate stories from yarns and yarns from throwaway bits of business; this is just one of the many that sprouted from an initial situation, with no particular authorial plan regarding destination.

Thank you. I love the ocean. I’m never so happy as when I’m by a large body of salt water. I’ve snorkeled and scubaed and was part of a four-year marine chemistry program in high school. So oceans have always been a place of fascination and love for me. I really wish there were an ocean-oriented Launchpad-type program for SFF writers.

The keys to collaboration are to agree beforehand on what kind of project you’re doing and then understand that the point is that it will come out differently than it would have if you’d done it by yourself.

Johnny Appleseed is a character that (historically) most people think of as a naturalist, as someone in touch with nature, and yet his story is one of invasion, of taking these plants that settlers wanted and spreading them, so in that, he’s very much a tool of colonization, of Manifest Destiny.

I’ve been fascinated by cryonics since I was a kid, when I first learned of it in Madeleine L’Engle’s book A Ring of Endless Light. That fascination was rekindled by an episode of This American Life several years ago, called “Mistakes Were Made,” which covered the story of a California cryonics pioneer who found himself stuck maintaining several “patients” on his own when the early foundation failed.