Popularity: 2
Vote:   | A story told from an entirely alien point of view would read like one long typographical error and quickly lose the interest of any human reader. |
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Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | And yet, technology does isolate us from the rhythms of the natural world we were designed to live in; and the more that happens, the more we suffer from insomnia, diabetes, asthma, and other ailments, not to mention the eternal misery of war, famine, and incurable disease. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | 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. |
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Vote: | 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? |
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Vote: | 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. |
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Vote: | But human beings, especially if we were raised in a major Western religious tradition (Christianity, Judaism, or Islam), like things broken down into either/or: Something is either good or evil, right or wrong, true or false, Order or Chaos. Choose one. |
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Vote: | 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. |
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Vote: | Cat, the main character of my other series, has been kicking at the walls of my right brain since I was seventeen years old, demanding to be heard (an unusual phenomenon, even for me). |
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Vote: | 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. |
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Vote: | Everything born has to die, in order to make room for the future. |
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Vote: | Everything in nature dies, from no-see-ums to galaxies. Amoral Nature devours its prey in the long grass, bloody of fang and claw. |
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Vote: | Fate, in some form or other, appears in virtually every culture's mythic/religious tradition. |
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Vote: | Fear of the unknown is a terrible fear. |
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Vote: | For every path you choose, there is another you must abandon, usually forever. |
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Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Humans are upsetting a fragile balance that their own human ancestors established. |
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Vote: | Humans may be the only creatures on Earth who spend significant time thinking about the fact that someday their lives will end. |
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Vote: | I envision stained glass when I attempt to explain how I create my future worlds. |
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Vote: | I needed a sound economic reason for the high-tech Hegemony to want control of it; one that would make the risk and expense of even bothering with Tiamat worthwhile to them. |
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Vote: | I wanted to show those characters discovering it is possible to find common ground, as they make their way through a plotline that I hope is engrossing enough to keep the reader a willing participant. |
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Vote: | I wanted to write a book that knocked every bogus, bigoted cliche I could think of on its ear. And I did. This is it. |
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Vote: | 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. |
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Vote: | It made me aware that many of the recurring elements in fairy tales were actually prehistoric religious symbolism: stories of the Goddess in her many forms, their meaning distorted over the millennia, and overlain with a paternalistic plethora of princes, not to mention evil stepmothers. |
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Vote: | Moon is also a naive native girl when she sets out for Carbuncle. |
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Vote: | Myth is, after all, the neverending story. |
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Vote: | 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. |
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Vote: | Probably I chose immortality because mortality is a universal human obsession. |
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Vote: | 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. |
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Vote: | The Big Questions, about survival and quality of life, are confronted by all the main characters in The Snow Queen, at some point. |
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Vote: | The contradictions are what make human behavior so maddening and yet so fascinating, all at the same time. |
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Vote: | The ecosystem of our world is a closed system: it would run out of gas, collapse of its own weight. |
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Vote: | 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. |
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Vote: | The mers are far more alien than our human neighbors . . . yet they are verifiably intelligent beings, and the Hegemony knows it. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | 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. |
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Vote: | The Snow Queen herself was certainly a goddess: an amoral, elemental force of nature. |
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Vote: | The Summers, for instance, share aspects of pre-industrial Europe and seafaring traditions from ancient Polynesia. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | There's no such thing as a free lunch, at least on the karmic level. |
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Vote: | 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. |
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Vote: | This was when the majority of women writers were just joining the SF field and female protagonists were still in short supply. |
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Vote: | 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. |
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Vote: | True beauty shines through, for the wise person who can see through the superficiality of perfect skin, or hidebound social judgments. |
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Vote: | We are all born with a unique genetic blueprint, which lays out the basic characteristics of our personality as well as our physical health and appearance. . . . And yet, we all know that life experiences do change us. |
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Vote: | What does immortality mean to me? That we all want more time; and we want it to be quality time. |
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Vote: | What I do not want to write is didactic political tracts. |