It’s been a while since I built a world.

 

My first sustained effort in that direction happened in two intense months in the fall of 1975 and resulted in my first novel, published in 1977. Though I didn’t specify the time, my sense was that my protagonist might be my own granddaughter, which would locate the year of the imagining at right about 2087.

 

The voice of that novel spoke in my head for months if not years before I actually sat down to write—a line here, a tiny revelation there, all of which felt like gifts, or omens. I collected them all for future use, and teased myself, as writers should, by not starting the book until I was so full of it I thought I might explode.

 

That sense of urgency is useful for overcoming self-doubt and the vast whiteness of the empty page. The hunger that leads to the making of novels or, I suspect, paintings or symphonies feels like nothing else on earth so much as desire. Creativity is a powerfully sexual drive.

 

In 1975, I didn’t see the universality of the personal computer or the Internet coming though I did, in my defense, imagine that communication and the consumption of written texts took place at terminals, on screens, and not on paper—to be honest, more a vision than a rigorous technological extrapolation.

 

 A bunch of other stuff, I nailed. That is, a lot of today is yesterday’s future, coming true.

 

Over the years, a lot of people have asked for a sequel to the first book, something that made no sense to me until a few years ago, the new book started to tease and whisper inside my head. Today, I am entirely seduced by it, ready as any lover to cast aside caution and gamble everything on the affair. Today, that means my house, my savings, my health insurance, things like that. Given the uncertainty of the world’s economy today, I could lose all those things anyway. Why not engage?

 

And so I remember: there are two tracks to engagement—the offscreen imagining of the world and its givens, and the word by word work of evoking it. The act of stitching together a future imagined 34 years ago with one that’s socially, politically, scientifically and technologically plausible today is a bit like surfing the inner curves of a Klein bottle, making the logically impossible manifest and habitable.

 

There is a breathtaking moment when the story meets its world. From there on, they unfold together, image by image, gesture by gesture, brought into being word by careful word. To hold those words in my hands, weighing and placing until they make something another human being willingly mistakes for real is an ecstatic process.

 

I remember now. This is a holiest thing I do.