The pain that is called “phantom limb” is caused by the loss of a major part of someone’s body; it consists of physical pain in the illusory presence of a body part that is gone. The emotional pain that my protagonist feels when he thinks of the people he loved that he’s lost—his mother, his brother, his daughter—is analogous. He’s not remembering the good times with any of those people, only the pain of the loss of what was.

NuTay believes that “dunyshar had no planet, no cultures to imitate, no people”—but I wonder, did you have any specific origin of the dunyshar in mind? I didn’t have anything too specific in mind beyond what’s offered in the story (that offworld humans help sustain their population by becoming surrogates and donating babies to the Port, […]

The plot assumes, of course, that most people are inherently vicious; whether or not that qualifies as insanity depends on your definition of sanity.

This is what I tell every aspiring writer: It should be more important to you to be good than to be published. If you stick with it long enough and don’t grow discouraged or bitter, you will become a better writer. And a writer who is true to herself is more likely to enjoy regular publication, anyway.

You don’t forget people who tried to kill, enslave, wipe out your ancestors! You don’t let them erase you from history. You write over them. Write stories that reinstate your people into those missing pages from history. You write SF stories, Western stories, that postulate a world where Indian means what it really ought to mean, a person from India, not an indigenous First Nation person who was mistakenly called Indian by a stupid, vicious European.

An animal can be brutal; there’s no moral judgment to the concept. It takes a thinking creature to be cruel.