An Interview by Jennifer Konieczny

“Some of them Closer” by Marissa Lingen will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2012 edited by Rich Horton. Pre-order here!

Montreal seems to reflect Mireille’s personality; it never quite accepts the changes that have occurred in the world. How intentional was that? How did you decide on Montreal as the setting?

I wrote this story because Jo Walton said, “You should write me a story about relativistic time travel and someone coming home.” I picked Montreal because I’ve enjoyed visiting Jo in Montreal several times, and Montreal is a wonderful city for blending past, present, and future. I know Montreal well enough to be able to see some details very clearly in my mind and then make up some others it would upset me to have changed.

I have to admit the squishy floors Mireille encounters on her return seemed as unnatural to me as to her—I even went barefoot on my carpet to confirm that it was more natural. Can you tell us how such an unsettling idea came about?

If you go into Brookstone or Williams-Sonoma or somewhere like that, they have little squishy mats that are supposedly far better for you to stand on than just standing flat on concrete or hard wood. Try standing up cooking all day on a hard wood or linoleum floor barefoot and see how much your feet hurt at the end! There’s a reason cooks and nurses wear really good shoes with really good support. I have vertigo, so I know that on the one hand it’s much easier to adjust your balance to a smooth, even surface. It would be very unsettling for me to deal with the squishy floors, too. But on the other hand, when you walk on dirt, the dirt gives a little and your foot gives a little. When you walk on concrete, all the “give” is in your foot.  Ow.

The other thing is that we look at the past, and the things they didn’t even think twice about doing, the things they didn’t even consider as part of their health just look bizarre and alarming. I think we have a tendency to extrapolate from the present and think, “Well, it’ll be more like this, more interested in nutrition, more interested in genetics,” and that’s probably true, but I think we also should try to think of what we’re not even thinking about that will be totally obvious to them, that they will be staring at us going, your feet, how can you not think of your feet? or whatever else.

When Mireille retrieves the three boxes she saved before leaving, she reflects, “Once you do the math on what will keep for a hundred years, it’s a lot easier to give away the things you can’t take with you.” What would you store for a hundred years?

I have here on my desk a little cup that glows sparklies when you shine ultraviolet light into it, and I put my late grandfather’s jewelry into it and my late great-grandmother’s jewelry. That would definitely go in the box, and depending on which relatives had gone before me, there might be a few more family pieces in it by then. A lot of what I’m emotionally attached to is either really easy to preserve digitally and recopy–this person’s books, that person’s photos–or very difficult to store for a hundred years intact. I have in my house my great-grandmother’s piano. If I do the math, it’s nearing a hundred years in the family already, and I have no intention of getting rid of it any time soon, but if I was going to be gone for a hundred years, could I store it? I don’t know. I don’t know if we could preserve my great-grandfather’s Kipling, but I’d sure try.

When Mireille posits, “If everything was different, I don’t think I would have minded as much,” Stephane notes, “You are perpetually minding just a little.” Do you find yourself also minding the way things are or does it only occur in places revisited?

We have a running joke at my house that the best new restaurant theme is going to be “that restaurant you can get all the things you used to like at other restaurants but they don’t make any more.” This is far less concise than “sushi,” though. The thing about having change at a rate of one year per year that’s much easier to cope with is that a lot of times I just learn to make those things at home, or try. So I’m not so much like Mireille. I don’t mind the way things are, I come up with projects.

Of course, then I mind the length of my project list, but that’s a different problem.