The more complicated question is why the SF magazines printed some of this stuff -- as you imply, several of the stories in this collection are missing what you might call the classic SF elements. But I suppose the magazine editors liked them because they saw a unity in my work as a whole, genre and non-genre: similarities of style and atmosphere, and a taste for psychological inversion. I think most readers won't care about the difference, or even notice it. After all, there's only one straight-up realistic story. All the rest have some sort of drastic abnormality.

I think a lot of SF writers grow up reading SF stories. And then when they themselves start to write, it's natural for them to work in that form -- copying what they like, and trying to outdo it. But I never read short stories until later. They tend to be very much about ideas, and I never used to like ideas much -- never could see the point of them, never could see how they helped you figure anything out. I preferred the layered accretion of novels: you don't have anything, and you add a little bit of nothing to it, and then a little more, and pretty soon there's something there, and it's moving and working in ways you hadn't anticipated. A short story tends not to function unless it's under your control from beginning to end, which used to make me nervous. You have to plan it out, and that's definitely not the way I thought writing should work. But I've changed a bit, and loosened up, and I'm glad. The novels have gotten better, too, perhaps coincidentally.

"The Breakthrough" was bought by Jennifer Hershey for an anthology, and I told her it wasn't really an SF story. But she didn't care, she said. Ellen Datlow bought "A Man On Crutches," and she said Science Fiction owned the whole doppelganger property, whether I liked it or not.

As for my own background, I was raised an agnostic, after many generations of genteel Episcopalianism. But my namesake in my family was a celebrated 18th century Congregationalist minister in southeastern Connecticut, a hard and passionate man. There was a time, I suppose, when I became religious: got myself confirmed, went frequently to communion, silent retreats, that sort of thing. Spiritual anxiety still comes upon me in waves, but as for organized forms, more and more they are just a kind of activity that seems significant. I was never one for faith. Doubt, it seems to me, speaks with the tongues of angels, you might say. But these stories have almost no religious component at all, it seems to me.

The antinomials in Rangriver Fell are moving against nature, and as I try to show, not one of them is able to remain pure; each one is seduced in some way. What they claim to want is impossible, and the only way to achieve it is to die. The story shows my own ambivalence, though; when I was a teenager, I remember I thought the world was on the edge of an enormous change, and there was no point preparing myself for some stupid profession or career. In the future, I thought, there wouldn't be any insurance executives or doctors or generals or engineers -- everyone would be grunting at each other and living in caves. But I remember also travelling in Jordan one winter, and talking to a man who had spent the first fifteen years of his life essentially alone, following a flock of sheep. I asked him what he used to think about all day, and his face took on a terrible and ferocious expression; he had no memories from that time, because he'd scarcely known how to talk. I tried to use some of that ferocity in Soldiers of Paradise, though the most obvious inspiration for the antinomials that book is my sister Jessy, who is autistic. Now middle-aged, she still looks like a twelve year old, because she has had essentially no experience. But that doesn't mean she is particularly happy; I imagine Adam and Eve were full of neurotic worries and anxieties before they met the snake.

I do think, though, that the old formats -- novels, short stories, SF magazines, books -- are under a certain amount of stress, which is not likely to decrease. The Miranda and Lucius in the dedication are my own children, and when I look at their complicated and busy lives, so full of intense stimuli, I wonder if they are going to sit still and read with the same concentration as I did -- a concentration, needless to say, that came out of boredom, and long summer afternoons with nothing to do, and ten inch black and white TVs with 3 idiotic channels, and one idiotic movie downtown that changed every two weeks. I teach sometimes at Williams College, which is a highly-rated and expensive place. Over the past decade I have seen and heard about a type of student that used to be rare and now appears to be the norm: someone who has never read a book for pleasure. Even the best novels, Moby Dick, say, or Remembrance of Things Past, or War and Peace, are famous for their boring passages almost as much as for their brilliance, and I wonder if a new generation of readers is going to have the patience to persevere.

Like everyone else I think literature in general will find itself increasingly squeezed by other more exciting media, and sf as a subset of literature will find itself squeezed as well. So my guess is the community will shrink but not disappear. The future, and imaginary worlds, will always provide subject matter. I myself think SF is getting better and better, and it is both discouraging and fascinating to think of the readership shrinking inexorably -- better and better novels, fewer and fewer readers, finally novels of unimaginable brilliance for readerships of one or even zero. It will be like the ending of Kafka's "The Hunger Artist," always one of my favorite stories.