“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 11th 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.
MORE: Read the whole story here!