In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is stoned to death.

The ecosystem of our world is a closed system: it would run out of gas, collapse of its own weight.

As for the historical inspirations I drew on in writing The Snow Queen, I suppose I would call them more cross-cultural inspirations, though they frequently involve past societies as well as present day ones.

There's more to me, more to the universe, than I suspected. Room for all the dreams I ever had, and all the nightmares...heroes in the gutters and in the mirror; saints in the frozen wasteland; fools and liars on the throne of wisdom, and hands reaching out in hunger that will never be filled.

Throughout the ages, stories with certain basic themes have recurred over and over, in widely disparate cultures; emerging like the goddess Venus from the sea of our unconscious.

Besides, wouldn't it be wonderful if no one ever had to worry about the random cruelty of fatal illness or the woes of old age attacking them or their loved ones?

And so The Snow Queen also became a story about the need to seek equilibrium, in our own lives, with the natural world, even within the universe at large.