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.”

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.

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.

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.

It wasn’t the world that appealed to me—in my head it’s just our world, a few years from now, except that a benevolent alien showed up and tried to teach us some things about engineering. My draw was Sharon, as somebody whose emotional life is out of sync with the emotional life she’s expected to have. We seem to be going through a bit of a cultural fetish for the clinically emotionally aberrant—you can’t turn around without finding Asperger’s or psychopathy or other things pop culture interprets as abnormal on that front.

The various elemental species revealed themselves to me one by one, at fairly long intervals. They didn’t come as stories. They came pretty much as they are in “Elementals.” Maybe at another period of my life I’d have used one or another of them in a conventional plotted story, but at this point, that seemed unnecessary. Pointing out their existence and characteristics was enough.

Every person may experience many changes in one’s life. You are willing to change yet still you may feel a bit uneasy about what may come after the change. Personally speaking, as a young writer who felt a bit bored about my old way of writing, I wanted to try something new and I was not afraid at that moment. But a good story should be the story of everyone, a story which could touch everyone. So I needed to reveal the other half of humanity: the other half that is afraid of what lies ahead.