“Cartographer Wasps and Anarchist Bees” by E. Lily Yu will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2012 edited by Rich Horton. Gina Guadagnino interviews her on the story.

The careful structures of the wasp and bee societies are integral to this story. Can you tell us if it was those structures that inspired the story, or if they happened to fit the story you wanted to tell?

I must have been aware on some level of that long tradition of writers and scientists, Virgil to Bernard Mandeville to James Gould, fascinated by the parallels between eusocial insects in general and bees in particular—the hive, the swarm, the nest—and human political realities. Maurice Maeterlinck wrote a beautiful little book called The Life of the Bee, which I first stumbled on in epitaphs to Laurie R. King’s The Beekeeper’s Apprentice many years ago, and bought; it is a short series of meditations and observations on the beehive and its inhabitants that frequently take flight into philosophical wonder. He writes of the swarm:

Where is the fatality here, save in the love of the race of today for the race of tomorrow? This fatality exists in the human species also, but its extent and power seem infinitely less. Among men it never gives rise to sacrifices as great, as unanimous, or as complete. What farseeing fatality, taking the place of this one, do we ourselves obey? We know not; as we know not the being who watches us as we watch the bees.

I had studied some entomology in high school; then in my sophomore year at Princeton a beekeeping club was formed, and I began attending classes and hanging around the hives. (We just caught a small swarm on campus last Wednesday.) Somehow all of these things combined with a graduate course on postcolonialism and the deadline for the Dell Awards to make a whole story.

These are guesses. I’m waffling. There are some stories that come to you by grace, or by a neutrino hitting your brain, whose origins are unfathomable. This was one of them.

More: Read the rest of the interview here!