Where Comes the Story

I've been writing ever since I learned how to spell. And it sometimes seems as if I have been writing "All the Time in Our World" almost that long.

One of the elements that alweays fascinated me in sci-fi and fantasy, from "Lord of the Rings" to "Star Trek" to just about every sci-fi or fantasy novel I ever read was the "ancient society". Frodo comes to Weathertop. Kirk comes to the City on the Edge of Forever and--in a book whose author and main characters I can't remember called "Lure of the Basalisk"--the hero comes to a ciy that's been abandoned for thousands of years.

When I read or watch such stories, I always wonder about those old cultures. Sure, they're fictional, but what were they like? The same thing happens when I read about modern archeologists who find evidence that man (and, most likely, woman) lived in some village that--three thousand years later--we don't even know the name of. I wonder what those folks were like. What did they do for fun? Did they have commerce with other villages? In the stories where the ancient society was technologically advanced, I want to know what brought them down. Simple hubris? A disease? Someone else even more advanced? Or a primitive society who--like the orcs at Helm's Deep--find an ancient culvert and exploit it?

One of the original ideas behind "All the Time in Our World" was this concept of the ancient society. Rather than creating a whole new ancient society and making up their rules and everything, I hit on a fascinating idea: what if we are the ancient society? What if the story is set thousands of years in our future and our great society of the United States of America is so long buried in the dust that we're not even a memory? What, if anything, of our culture might survive? From that little acorn of an idea, the story began to grow.