“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.

MORE: Read the entire interview here!