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I have seen a few seventeen year cicadas lately, and expect to see many more. In fact, I think I saw one dead one on the sidewalk a number of weeks ago; if so, he or she probably emerged too early.
I do remember the previous year of the cicada brood, when I went to Balticon to see, among others, the great Lois McMaster Bujold; my cycle of Bujold in Haiku was printed in the convention booklet. Ms. Bujold has said that her experience of the cicadas back then was part of the inspiration for the Sharing Knife series, because the cicadas got her thinking: what if the heroes can’t just slay the monster, or the evil overlord, and be done? What if new monsters keep emerging from the soil, so the monster slayers have to keep up their vigilance year after year, generation after generation, knowing that one failure could result in a monster consuming the whole world?
The cicadas should be credited for their contribution to literature, if nothing else.
I do remember the previous year of the cicada brood, when I went to Balticon to see, among others, the great Lois McMaster Bujold; my cycle of Bujold in Haiku was printed in the convention booklet. Ms. Bujold has said that her experience of the cicadas back then was part of the inspiration for the Sharing Knife series, because the cicadas got her thinking: what if the heroes can’t just slay the monster, or the evil overlord, and be done? What if new monsters keep emerging from the soil, so the monster slayers have to keep up their vigilance year after year, generation after generation, knowing that one failure could result in a monster consuming the whole world?
The cicadas should be credited for their contribution to literature, if nothing else.
