“A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong” by K.J. Parker will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2012 edited by Rich Horton. Gina Guadagnino interviews Parker on the story.

Obviously there’s a motif of ‘the caged bird’ in “A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong.” Which came first, the idea of the caged bird, or the characters and the story?

As always with me, the characters came first, and the characters are the walking wounded I intercept as they limp away from the battle between right and wrong. I’m very much a one-trick pony. Everything I write deals with the debatable land on the border of good and evil. In ‘Blue & Gold’ I had a whole lot of fun with the idea of someone who was (a) a leading philosopher and scientist and (b) a conman and habitual liar always one jump ahead of the law; all I had to do was turn him loose and follow him around for a while. This time, I took a similar character and locked him in a confined space with his exact opposite. (If there’s a Society for the Ethical Treatment of Characters somewhere, I imagine I’m quite high up on their hit list). To that extent, the idea of putting caged birds on a window ledge so they’ll overheat, suffer and sing is something of an in-joke, since that’s what I like to do with the characters I write about.

MORE: Read the entire Interview