There are stories which explode out of me as soon as the spark of an idea bursts through my brain, and there are ideas which take decades of simmering before they’re ready to be turned into stories. My novelette “An Invitation for the Uninvited,” published October 31, 2023 in the anthology Qualia Nous 2, edited by Michael Bailey, was one of the latter.
I don’t want to spoil anything about this tale of surreptitious first contact with aliens, so let me simply say I’d been carrying around a philosophical concept about how I felt the human race might respond to that contact I had no idea how to flesh out into people and their desires, and until I understood how to make it a story which would touch the heart, rather than a treatise which would speak only to the brain, it was something I’d think about from time to time, but had no idea how to write.
Then, at the end of 2022, this nugget I’d been lugging round for at least a quarter of a century became real to me … and I suddenly knew who the story was about. I don’t know why I knew. It was just … time.
Which I why I always say I don’t write the story — the story writes me.
I hope you enjoy what the story made of me this time.