I think it’s safe to say that the most popular story I’ve written is “When The Fleet Comes” (which you can buy at the link to the right for only $1.00). It was for months the best-selling short story for Digital Fiction Corporation, and for all I know, still is.

“Where do you get your ideas” is a classic question to writers that has become a cliche, and most of us respond with something like “where don’t you get ideas,” because seriously, they’re everywhere. Contrary to many assumptions, writers never run out of ideas. They just run out of ways to execute them properly, which is a lot harder. But this one, I remember.

So many of my ideas for writing stories seem to come from me being tired of reading the same old plots again. The core of the story — that the Earth is destroyed — is a very old one, going back arguably to religious prophecy. But those stories always seem to end in one of two ways: humanity escapes to a new world and/or achieves revenge on its destroyers, and starting anew as masters of their own fates (When Worlds Collide, Titan, A.E.) or it’s entirely a memento mori tale (On The Beach, I Am Legend).

And yet history is replete with the stories of people whose tribes were almost wiped out, leaving them with no home to go to, no new frontier within their reach. The Native Americans, the Tibetans, the South Vietnamese, and too many others to count were left with the choice to live under an alien dictatorship, or to flee into exile and live with aliens. And they had to go on, and build new lives in cultures that would never be theirs, and preserve parts of themselves to pass on to their children, knowing that it would never be more than parts.

There was no one moment that inspired me to write the story. I just wondered how people from my own heritage might deal with the loss of their entire social and cultural framework. And so I considered Sean, the orphan adopted into alien culture, never really considering “his” people to be his. And I considered Amanda and her father, George, trying to, in their own way, continue the human race on an alien world, and finding their own, flawed answers to the question, what is important? What do we remember? What do we do to survive? What makes us… us? They do it by turning inward, but also by accepting a grim necessity. And I also considered Sean’s alien wife, Ajna, and her well-meaning naivete that hurts him, but nevertheless holds a degree of insight into his pain.

In any case, it seems to have spoken to more people than anything else I’ve ever written, and I think this is one of the things I really value in the SF I choose to read: the challenging of the dichotomies that are so often presented. The cry, “Victory or Death” echoes down through the ages and is a popular theme, but what happens when the first is out of your reach and the second seems unthinkable? If you are one of those who read the story and enjoyed it, I can only say, thank you for showing me that I am not alone in considering these things.