The western as a genre has a rich and deep body of tropes to draw upon. That richness and depth does so much work for the writer—the scenery’s already in the reader’s mind, the sets, the atmosphere, the costumes. A reader brings all of that into the story with her, and that translates to, as you said, expectation. As the storyteller, I benefit from that immensely.

I’m an anxious person, and like most anxious people, I often spin through a hundred different “But what if I had just done this instead?” possibilities when I screw up. Sarah’s machine is a literal version of that. She has to run through all the possibilities before she can confront the idea that she has this one world. As Dahlia points out, their daughter is missing and possibly in trouble, and Sarah’s locked away in the basement.

Some of the kindest and most sensitive ER staff I know are people who look really physically intimidating; they’ve developed such good people skills because they realize they can scare patients just by walking into a room. Tiny women in marginalized jobs need to be tremendously strong to survive that experience. That’s true, really, of anyone at the bottom of any pecking order.

The story developed out of a non-literary project: I was invited to give a talk at an academic conference at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, in 2001. The conference was on Human Origins, especially the development of sentience, and I was invited to address the idea of non-human intelligence. Scarcely having gone to college myself, I was intimidated by the eminences in paleontology and linguistics elsewhere on the program.

Fiction is about expressing ideas, and ideas are political. “Ignoring politics” is itself a political stance. At the same time, fiction is limited if your goal is actually to convince people of one political point or another. You can explore ideas, but you’re often preaching to the choir. In most of my fiction, I write with a particular message in mind, although my last story in Lightspeed, “The Venus Effect,” was pretty political by design.

I’ve heard it said that readers of fiction have a greater capacity for empathy than non-readers. I have no idea how true that is, but it feels good to say. We can read facts all day, but we won’t necessarily understand how a situation might feel until it happens to us. Imagination helps with that, but where our own imagination fails us, fiction steps in and leads us around for that proverbial mile.