Year’s Best 2012: Anya Johanna DeNiro on “Walking Stick Fires”

“Walking Stick Fires” by Anya Johanna DeNiro will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2012 edited by Rich Horton.

What are the origins of Walking Stick Fires?

I really wanted to write a story with a fast pace and something of an ‘on the road’ tale with two friends. I began with aliens on motorcycles and thought: now just how did they get here? I had also spent some time in New Mexico before writing this story so that landscape (or rather a heavily mutated version of that landscape) was on my mind as well as the backdrop.

You mentioned on your website that you consider this to be Infernokrusher–can you tell us more about that?

Infernokrusher is a quasi-real literary movement that sprang up online in 2005 as kind of an alternate branding for slipstream. Googling Infernokrusher will lead to the whole convoluted story and narrative of this–but it kind of evolved from a tongue-in-cheek literary movement to something with real heft behind it. And by “heft” I mean an aesthetic based on breakneck speed, rapid changes in plot, and explosions. Thus those were definite “tentpoles” for this story.

The Being in this story is slowly stripping away North America of its resources: do you see Walking Stick Fires as a cautionary tale?

Absolutely–and those kinds of issues came out more in a second draft, were sharpened that way. I wanted, in a humorous but poignant way, to show what an occupying force was thinking and feeling. That they were existing in a gray area rather than something black or white. That is to say, they had opinions of Earth culture but didn’t really know it particularly well, even if they were well-intentioned.