The shootings seem like ancient history now; but for the sake of our souls, we have to remember that history is about real people with real lives and real deaths. There's something disturbing about the air of unreality with which we often view the past—as if anything that happened more than a few days ago took place in some alien dimension that doesn't have much to do with who we are now. I'm certainly guilty of feeling that way, too…which is one reason I wrote a story about fading memories and trivializing other people's tragedies.

"Withered Gold, the Night, the Day": I'm normally a pretty cheerful guy…but when I saw the movie Se7en in 1995, this story just came blurting out over the next three days. A story in which the world is withered, thinned out, shriveled. Where Everyman is a despairingly unbalanced vampire who seeks moral guidance from the Devil in a bus shelter.

I should know better than to see certain types of movies. If I'd seen a movie about the Care Bears, heaven knows what I might have written.

"The Last Day of the War, with Parrots": A story from a woman's point of view. People ask why I use female narrators so much. My answer is (a) I don't use them any more often than I use male narrators, and (b) why shouldn't I use female narrators, provided I'm not a jerk about it? To be sure, men often do lousy jobs of portraying women—but I have to believe that's just sloppiness and inattention, not an inevitable fact of gender. I don't accept that the only type of character I can legitimately write about is someone very much like myself…because frankly, I'm bored with middle-aged middle-class white men, and there are far too many of those guys in science fiction already.

Therefore, I resolved long ago that whenever I wrote about the future, I would show it containing just as many women as men, not to mention people of diverse cultural backgrounds, old, young, straight, gay, rich, poor, and every other variation I could make fit within the story's logic. That's the sort of future world I wouldn't mind living to see.