“The Last Triangle” by Jeffrey Ford will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012 edited by Paula Guran. Molly Tanzer interviews him on the story.

The idea of “using” has all sorts of lovely resonances in “The Last Triangle”, as does the idea of needing help to break an addiction. Do you think Ms. Berkley saw herself in Thomas from the get-go, or did the realization come to her over time?

I don’t believe either of them was conscious of their need for each other at first. Thomas is staying with Ms. Berkley before she discovers the “the last triangle.” As it turns out they both need each other in their loneliness but also are both eventually willing to make sacrifices for each other, and that latter fact elevates “using” to something else entirely.

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“Fields of Gold” by Rachel Swirsky 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.

One of the biggest hurdles in this narrative is to convey the passage of time in a timeless place, yet you manage it so well through the use of Dennis’s lists and flashbacks. What do those two devices allow you to do with the story?

The story is functionally timeless, I suppose, because time has ended for Dennis, but I don’t see it as narratively timeless. He’s still experiencing a sequence of events that has an emotional impact for him. What he hears and when he hears it creates his revelation. I think it’s actually a pretty traditional story shape if you strip off the setting and just look at the story as a skeleton. That said, I think Dennis feels trapped; there’s a tension in the story between the fact that he’s having his midlife crisis and feeling like the time he has to live is dwindling… while at the same time, the time he has to live has both technically become nothing (since he’s dead) and everything (since there doesn’t seem to be any end to existence). I think he’s very preoccupied with time and I think the flashbacks and the lists help illuminate that part of his mental state.

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“The Sighted Watchmaker” by Vylar Kaftan will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2012 edited by Rich Horton. Christie Yant interviews her on the story.

You seem to be as much at home in biology as you are in physics. Which scientific disciplines do you feel most comfortable borrowing from when writing science fiction? Are there disciplines you’re too uncomfortable with to try?

My strongest disciplines are genetics, epidemiology, and neuroscience. I’m reasonably solid in astronomy and immunology as well. There are certainly disciplines I’m not as knowledgeable in, but that’s fixable with research and study. I can’t imagine being uncomfortable about an entire discipline. There’s plenty of stories I wouldn’t want to try without some research, but that’s not the same thing. I think writers should write what they know—but  if they don’t know it, they need to learn it. And that includes all the sciences.

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“Ghostweight” by Yoon Ha Lee will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012 edited by Paula Guran. Andrew Liptak interviews her on the story.

You make a point about what people carry with them: what is most important to have for the end of one’s days?

I couldn’t presume to answer that question for anyone else, so I’ll answer for myself. “End of one’s days” isn’t even meaningful. It’s no secret that everyone eventually dies. So the question reduces (in a mathematical sort of way) to what’s most important to have in the moving now, because that moment could at any point be the last one.

There is, sadly, a difference between what I would like to tell you I believe, and what I really believe based on my actions. I would like to tell you about love or honor or honesty. But when I look at what I do–always knowing death might be about to knock–what I think is important is having something to do, and trying to excel at it; trying to create things that are beautiful. I don’t recommend this as a way of life. It doesn’t have much in common with happiness or kindness or any of the thousand things that make people worthwhile. But whenever I have to make choices about what to do with my life, that the priority that comes out.

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“Rocket Man” by Stephen Graham Jones will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012 edited by Paula Guran. Molly Tanzer interviews him on the story.

“It had used to be Michael T from over on Oak Circle, but you’re not supposed to call zombies by their people names.” So, what are you supposed to call zombies once they change?

Trick is, zombies, whether Rage or Romero or Haitian, just turned or winding down, on their last rib, they all break down into two basic categories: known and unknown. As in, if this flesheater coming at you down the hall was once your mom, say, then you’re maybe going to hesitate a moment. And that’s all that not-Mom-anymore zombie needs. It’s over for you. So, calling Michael T by his people name, that could be the difference between life and death. If he’s just a shuffler or a walker or a ‘zombie,’ though, then you can waste him without having to apply any thought to the act. Which, that’s the real pleasure of the zombie apocalypse: just like them, we don’t have to think, can just react. There’s no shades of right and wrong. It’s just kill kill kill. In our lives, there’s so much thinking, so much deciding. When dealing with zombies, there’s none of that. A lot of people look on the zombie apocalypse as a kind of vacation from themselves, I suspect. And we all empathize.

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