In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is stoned to death.
Throughout the ages, stories with certain basic themes have recurred over and over, in widely disparate cultures; emerging like the goddess Venus from the sea of our unconscious.
Each time, storytellers clothed the naked body of the myth in their own traditions, so that listeners could relate more easily to its deeper meaning.
A clear conscience is generally the result of a faulty memory, not a faulty life.
Everything born has to die, in order to make room for the future.
But our society does not grant nontraditional forms of intelligence equal recognition, no matter how much it would help us get along or truly enrich our lives.
Besides, wouldn’t it be wonderful if no one ever had to worry about the random cruelty of fatal illness or the woes of old age attacking them or their loved ones?
Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction.
Here was a fragment of Goddess myth that, through all its permutations, had somehow escaped being turned on its head. It was the perfect springboard for the sort of novel I wanted to write.
Humans are upsetting a fragile balance that their own human ancestors established.
Humans may be the only creatures on Earth who spend significant time thinking about the fact that someday their lives will end.
I was thinking about what I wanted to write next, after my first novel, and had decided that I wanted to write a story with a lot of strong female characters in it.
Moon is also a naive native girl when she sets out for Carbuncle.
The ecosystem of our world is a closed system: it would run out of gas, collapse of its own weight.
The mers were also designed to reproduce only at long intervals, in order to maintain the natural balance of the environment in which they were placed.
What I do not want to write is didactic political tracts.
Probably I chose immortality because mortality is a universal human obsession.
As for the historical inspirations I drew on in writing The Snow Queen, I suppose I would call them more cross-cultural inspirations, though they frequently involve past societies as well as present day ones.
The contradictions are what make human behavior so maddening and yet so fascinating, all at the same time.
Don’t worry. You’re safe now. You’ve got nothing left to steal.