“Canterbury Hollow” by Chris Lawson will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2012 edited by Rich Horton. Jennifer Konieczny interviews Lawson on the story.

How does your work as a family physician impact your writing?

For one thing, I’m much more familiar with biomedicine than other branches of science. Some of the stories I’ve written would never have occurred to me if I had no background in medicine. At least two of my stories were triggered by reading specific papers and wanting to explore the ideas raised (“Screening Test” and “Empathy” if anyone’s interested).

What a career in medicine gives a writer is an understanding of how people react to major life events. Not only have I seen people deal with terrible situations, I’ve seen lots of people do so with a wide range of responses. Much of the daily work of medicine is as mundane as any other job, of course. I have yet to see a trolley burst through the doors of an Emergency Department with a phalanx of people in blue scrubs yelling “STAT!”, although according to television it’s an hourly event. The real drama in medicine is slow, unfolding over months or years.

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“Rampion” by Alexandra Duncan will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2012 edited by Rich Horton. Andrew Liptak interviews DeNiro on the story.

Your story is set at a time of growing religious strife: What lessons do you think carry over from this time period to the present day?

Unfortunately, I don’t think human beings have changed very much in the last millennium. We’re just as fractious, corrupt, and stubborn as we were at the turn of the 11^th century, and just as certain that our religion or political philosophy is the only correct one. Part of what I wanted to explore in “Rampion” was the damage fundamentalism can do to individual people and to a culture as a whole. However, I also wanted to discuss what a murky force it is. In my experience, fundamentalism often doesn’t come from one side alone – it’s an accumulation of fear, hate, and confusion from many vantage points, and it eventually grows to the point that it blinds us to the possibility of a third way.

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“The Adakian Eagle” by Bradley Denton will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2012 edited by Rich Horton. Jennifer Konieczny interviews DeNiro on the story.

The protagonist notes, “And meeting Pop was how I wound up seeing the future. Trust me when I tell you that you don’t want to do that. Especially if the future you see isn’t even your own. Because then there’s not a goddamn thing you can do to change it.” If the opportunity presented itself, would you look into the future? Do you think your reaction to the future would be more like the Private’s or more like Pop’s?

Planning for the future is a good thing . . . but seeing every important detail of one’s own personal future life would be (in my opinion) awful. That would be the ultimate spoiler, wouldn’t it? We all see ourselves as the protagonists of our own stories–and nobody likes to be told the end of a story while the story’s in progress!

In that regard, I share the Private’s opinion. But if I did happen to see future events in the sort of detail that Pop does in “The Adakian Eagle,” I hope I would respond with the same kind of stoicism that he displays. (But I think Pop might have more strength of character than I do.)

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“Walking Stick Fires” by Alan DeNiro will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2012 edited by Rich Horton. Andrew Liptak interviews DeNiro on the story.

The Being in this story is slowly stripping away North America of its resources: do you see Walking Stick Fires as a cautionary tale?

Absolutely–and those kinds of issues came out more in a second draft, were sharpened that way. I wanted, in a humorous but poignant way, to show what an occupying force was thinking and feeling. That they were existing in a gray area rather than something black or white. That is to say, they had opinions of Earth culture but didn’t really know it particularly well, even if they were well-intentioned.

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“The Last Sophia” by C.S.E. Cooney will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2012 edited by Rich Horton. T.J. McIntyre interviews Cooney on the story.

“The Last Sophia” alternates between a first person narrative and letters. What inspired you to use this format?

Well, I love epistolary stories. I can’t help myself. If a letter is kind of like an act of complicit voyeurism and reading like that of telepathy, I think an epistolary story satisfies our human appetite both for the amazing mysteries of mentalism and for plain old vice. Also, structurally, alternating letters with stream of consciousness was a way to differentiate between the protagonist’s lucid moments and her febrile ones. Then again, she’s not–as she’d be the first to tell you–the world’s most reliable narrator. Was she ever really writing letters, or just dreaming them? Is she thinking her thoughts or speaking them aloud? Who can say? No one. Except, perhaps, the last Sophia.

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