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.
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.
To be alive was to be disappointed. You tried and failed and kept on trying, never knowing whether you’d ever get what you wanted. But sometimes we get what we need.
For every path you choose, there is another you must abandon, usually forever.
Fear of the unknown is a terrible fear.
These days too many of us seem inclined to cover our ears, close our eyes, and blindly follow the most narrow, conservative tenets of religion or else seek comfort in the ancient traditions of New Age ritual.
Myth is, after all, the neverending story.
Theres no such thing as a free lunch, at least on the karmic level.
The futures and ultimate fates of the characters in The Snow Queen are profoundly changed by choices made in their own minds or hearts, as well as choices unexpectedly forced on them by things beyond their control.
Archaeology is the anthropology of the past, and science fiction is the anthropology of the future.
Life scars us with its random motion, he thought. Only death is perfect.
And so The Snow Queen also became a story about the need to seek equilibrium, in our own lives, with the natural world, even within the universe at large.
Studying anthropology, I developed a kind of holistic view of human existence, in which the dichotomies you listed are all necessary and vital aspects of life.
Perhaps the thing that makes humans truly unique on Earth is that we are never satisfied with our situation; maybe that is what’s taken us so far.
What does immortality mean to me? That we all want more time; and we want it to be quality time.