About the Story

Many of my short stories have a clear conceptual framework. Others come from a mysterious alchemy of unrelated ideas. This is one of the latter. And I think that’s part of what makes it a funny short story, rather than an exciting or tragic one. The ideas interact in ways you don’t expect.

Natalia Poklonskaya & Manga

In 2014, Russia carried out some sort of invasion/annexation of the Crimean peninsula. American commentators tended to consider it fairly treacherous. Apparently, it featured the involvement of masked soldiers without insignia.

There came a time when it wasn’t at all clear what the Autonomous Republic of Crimea was. A local independence movement? Or a Russian invasion? One major player in all the confusion was Natalia Poklonskaya. She gave a famous press conference. Many see her as a perfidious Russian puppet.

The Internet reacted to all this. Incredibly strangely. By creating an absolute metric ton of amateur manga.

So that’s in this story.

Equatorial Guinea & Oil

Another ingredient was the real ethical difficulty of international trade with dictator-led nations. I was thinking particularly of Equatorial Guinea at the time, and oil. This isn’t a paper on ethical philosophy. But it’s a thorny problem, and something of that tension worked its way into this story. However, in a funny short story, I wanted to be respectful to the dead. So I used a light referential touch. Thinking of the way Ghost Dance deals with injustice in the beginning, coming at it from the side.

Machine Elves

Users of the hallucinatory drug DMT sometimes report meeting extra-dimensional beings. The reports are eerily similar, and have given rise to the idea of machine elves. Machine elves live behind the fabric of reality. They are immensely powerful and beautiful. They may be what holds reality together. (And probably not really real.) People talk about them in weird places. It’s a thought-world that reminds me of VALIS.

They’re in this story.

The Inner Secret

Imagine a cathedral. One work of statuary is more beautiful than all the rest. The artist labored on it for a decade. It rests on the very highest peak of the roof, where no human can ever see it. Ever. Who is it for?

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