Can you talk a bit about how this story took shape and what inspirations fed into it?

I’ve been working lately in a distinctly new style—quite different from my other stories—that I call “the tale.” In these stories, you don’t bother with setting the scene or writing from ‘within’ the body. Instead, you just tell the story, as simply as if your reader was sitting across from you at the table. This style sacrifices immediacy, but it allows for much more flexibility in terms of scope. With this style, I can make the thousand-year jump at the end quite simply. I don’t need the reader to intuit that time has passed: instead I can just tell them.

This style was highly-influenced by early prose fictions. I spent much of the fall of 2023 reading the Icelandic family sagas, some of Europe’s earliest prose fictions. These sagas are written in a clear, unadorned style that’s so anonymous it’s quite different to state, confidently, how many authors were involved in writing the sagas, or whether they had individual authors at all. I was also influenced by Boccaccio’s The Decameron and Apuleius’s The Golden Ass—two collections of tales that also mix the realistic and fantastic and are, similarly, told in a plain, unadorned style.

There’s a lot of meta working here in regard to the question of “who is the main character, who is the hero,” but what I found most interesting is how much Tomas’ deep insecurity shapes the narrative. Why did you approach the story in this way?

We all have a role in this world, but largely our role is not to be the hero. Tomas is a guy who grew up on some little hick planet, dreamed of getting off, and did in fact succeed in escaping. But now he finds himself trapped on this starship, and his whole being is subservient to this purpose that he didn’t necessarily choose. Where, moreover, he doesn’t necessarily have the biggest role, and could probably be replaced by another person. That’s just what life is, no? As you grow older, you find that your life has certain contours, and although you chose those contours, you’re now also trapped by them. You have to keep actively choosing this life, even though, on some level, you feel all your choice is gone.

“Totalizing individuality,” as opposed to diversity, sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it isn’t really specified much beyond the great threat that Our Hero(es) have to defeat. What does it mean to you, and what led you to have the great threat be something so fungible?

I think that’s the contradiction we’re always facing when it comes to diversity. We want to have a collective that is varied and yet cohesive. I imagined that in opposition to this diversity, you could also have an individuality that is collective. This is the world of the fascism—where the hopes and dreams of a nation are all bound up in a single personality, who expresses everyone’s individuality on their behalf. The danger with diversity is that it can be quite flattening: to the extent we maintain our individuality, we are cut off from each other, and life feels empty. But to the extent that we lose our individuality, then life feels pointless.

I noticed that there aren’t any quotes in the story for dialogue. If this isn’t a standard formatting decision for you, did something about the story lend itself to that style, and what differences do you think quote-formatting choices make for the reader?

In literary fiction, I joke that if you want to be taken seriously you must eschew quotation marks. I think this fashion arose, in part, because sometimes in Europe a writer will use dashes instead of quotation marks. The major writer to adopt this convention was James Joyce, in Ulysses, but in many European languages (French and Russian, in particular) the quotation dash is the standard convention. To Americans, this convention seems very fancy and, well, very European, so we adopt it self-consciously, because of our own insecurity. And . . . that’s why I did it! That was an experiment for me, and I liked how it looked, although I don’t think I’ve ever done it since.

Is there anything you’re working on that you’d like to talk about? What can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?

Yes, most of my energies these days are devoted to my newsletter, Woman of Letter. Tuesdays I publish critical essays (here’s one about Ted Chiang’s overt sentimentality) and Thursdays I publish short tales (here’s a story, inspired by Asimov, about Mars colonization). The newsletter has about 5,000 subscribers, which probably makes it one of the most popular short-fiction publications on the platform. I also have a nonfiction book about the Great Books coming out from Princeton University Press in 2026: it’s entitled What’s So Great About The Great Books?