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.

The idea for “Come-from-Aways” came from an article I wrote for a local magazine about the Shag Harbour Incident, a well-documented UFO crash that took place in the sixties near my home in southwest Nova Scotia. There’s a great little museum in the town of Shag Harbour and several witnesses still living in the area who are happy to chat about the crash.

My dreams love to kill me off. They kill me off in intensely gory ways, in highly cinematic ways, in highly mortifying ways. I am well-used to dreams where I am in a car that plunges off the edge of a mountain road into water many hundreds of feet below, and indeed have them so frequently that my dreaming self is occasionally able to say, “Oh, this. I’ve been through this already. I don’t need to worry about this.”

top nattering around the edges and reading every single “advice on writing” book or essay you come across—I am convinced that this is a pernicious form of writer’s block and the only way to avoid it is to hold your nose and jump in. Remember that if your first drafts stink, that’s a good thing: It means you have something to work with in subsequent drafts, which is where the real writing happens.