This is the story of a woman who is crossing a post-climate crunch America on a solar-powered ebike. Are you a cyclist? If so, how did you get into bikes?

I don’t know that I’d call myself a cyclist. That sounds rather serious and committed. I’m a woman with a bicycle. I learned to ride a bicycle as a child. Since then, I think, I have always had a bicycle of some sort. At this point, I have a mountain bike and an e-bike.

Why? Because for me, riding a bicycle has always felt like freedom.

I’m not alone in this, of course. The bicycle has long been recognized as contributing to women’s liberation. Suffragist Susan B. Anthony echoed the feelings of many women of her time when she said: “Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.”

I gave my character Sandy a bicycle because riding a bicycle connects you to the landscape you are traversing in a way that driving a car does not. You feel each hill; you rejoice in each valley. You have the time to appreciate the land. When you’re on a bike, you can’t rush the journey—and that’s important. A journey of discovery cannot be rushed.

I love the high tech art installations—the ghosts—of this story. How did you come up with this idea?

The idea for the art installations came from my work at the Exploratorium, San Francisco’s museum of science, art, and human perception. I was a science writer there for more than twenty years.

The Exploratorium was where I first realized that optical illusions—which had always fascinated me—are much more than tricks and amusements. Illusions reveal a fundamental truth about how you perceive the world. You think you see the world—but you don’t. The information that your eyes send to your brain is incomplete, distorted, upside-down, full of holes. What you see is actually a construction of the world that your brain creates from incomplete information. Your eyes provide some information—and your brain makes up the rest. (Sometimes the brain makes up things that aren’t true and that invention creates an optical illusion.)

Some of the Exploratorium’s most memorable exhibits were built by artists as part of the museum’s Artist-in-Residence program. Many of these artworks focus your attention on something you have often seen, but never really paid attention to. In my imaginary world (the part of the story that is not on the page), the artist who built the first twenty-first century ghost may have been an Artist-in-Residence at the Exploratorium. To create a first ghost, they took some of their inspiration from optical illusions—giving the viewer part of the information they needed and letting them fill in the rest.

Throughout Sandy’s journey, she writes haiku poetry about the ghosts she discovers. These tiny poems are very effective and beautiful. Which came first, the poetry or the story? And do you have a regular poetry practice?

I wanted to communicate Sandy’s feelings about the ghosts—a kernel of emotion without many words. Haiku seemed like the ideal way to capture that.

The story and the haiku came along together. Once I realized that a haiku was the way to capture each ghost, I imagined each ghost, then wrote the haiku.

I don’t have a regular poetry practice, but I do love writing haiku. I have gone through periods where I wrote daily haiku. I’m not doing that now, but maybe it’s time to do it again.

One time, at the suggestion of a poet, I tried to write a sonnet a day. That didn’t work out too well.

I believe the core message of this piece is that people care about each other, about the planet, about science, about everything, much more than we think they do. I’ve also noticed that “caring” is a thread running throughout your previous work at Lightspeed (including the stories “Motherhood” and “Crossing the Threshold”). Do you think writing about people who care is more challenging or more important in today’s society? And do you have other works that incorporate that theme?

Right now, just four days before the 2024 presidential election, it’s hard for me to think about anything that doesn’t involve caring about the world, about each other, about science, about the truth.

I don’t think it is more challenging to write about people who care. For me, it would be difficult to write about people who didn’t care. But I do think it is important to write about those who care, those who want to make the world better, those who stand in the way of people who would like to tear the world down.

I have been fortunate that I have always worked with colleagues and collaborators who cared deeply about the work we were doing—whether it was teaching people about science, changing the world with art, or writing books that helped children explore their world. We worked because we cared about the work—our goal mattered. And yet at the same time, it was enormous fun. This is the interesting balancing act that has informed my fiction.

I can think of several works that overtly deal with people who care—and whose work makes a difference. Check out my short stories “Inappropriate Behavior” on Escape Pod and “About Fairies” on Reactor.com. I’d also suggest my novel, The City, Not Long After, currently available as an ebook.

Now that we’ve talked about some of your older work, tell us what you’ve got coming out next!

My latest novel is The Adventures of Mary Darling, a retelling of Peter Pan from the point of view of Wendy’s mother, Mary Darling. From Mary’s viewpoint, this is a child abduction story.

But wait—there’s more! Mary Darling just happens to be the niece of John Watson. (Yes, the John Watson who chronicled the adventures of Sherlock Holmes.) So of course Holmes gets involved—taking on the case of the missing children. This is a bit of a problem for Mary, since she doesn’t much like Holmes.

I started the book as a feminist take on Peter Pan and Sherlock Holmes, but I quickly realized that I wasn’t just dealing with feminist issues—I was taking on the entire British Empire. I now know more than anyone should about J.M. Barrie’s taste in dime novels, the women fencers in the early 1900s, prosthetic legs in Victorian London, Wild Wild West Shows, and other obscure and yet fascinating topics.

The Adventures of Mary Darling is an historic fantasy with a feminist twist. It will be out in May from Tachyon Publications. According to Tachyon, Mary Darling is the “populist hero the Victorian era never knew it needed”—and who am I to argue?