I'll say congratulations. That is wonderful. I read what you wrote about it. Not anything that I would read but it sure does sound fascinating that anyone could write such a story. Good work .....

I was weaned on New Wave SF (late 60s-early 70s), and when I shopped this around I put into my query letter that the Deviations series follows the New Wave tradition -- i.e., dealing with matters of social relevance, inner versus outer space, taboos, etc.

I miss that subgenre, too, which is why I write in that vein. :) I have been ever since the 70s. "Hermit Crabs," forthcoming in Electric Velocipede, is a science fictional treatment of teens in crisis. "Lazuli," published in Asimov's in Nov. 1984, was a science fictional treatment of childhood sexual abuse and actually managed to get me on the final ballot for the John W. Campbell Award.

My initial inspiration for Deviations (which began as a short story I'd written in '85) came from Joseph Payne Brennan's poem, "When Tigers Pass" (from his Sixty Selected Poems, The New Establishment Press, 1985). Subsequent leads came from anthropologist Michael Harner's "The ecological basis for Aztec sacrifice" (American Ethnologist 4(1), February 1977) and Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines (Penguin, 1988). My epigraph for Covenant is a quote from The Songlines.

One New Wave source I know of is the Paraspheres series by Omnidawn, at
www.omnidawn.com/