I had Amathar in my head for many years before I started writing it. In many ways, it is the perfect world that I pictured when I was a teenager. It still reflects quite a few of my own personal feelings about the technological world. I have always hated talking on the telephone. I don’t know why, I just do. My cell minutes are usually in the single digits for any given month. I suppose that it’s no surprise then that there are no phones in Amathar. The Amatharians don’t like to hear voices that don’t have a face with them. They don’t have radios or any long-distance communication. This has the added storytelling benefit of leaving our hero alone without any way to contact help. On the other hand, I like to write. The Amatharians all love to write. Hardly any Amatharian reaches adulthood without having written at least one book, and they communicate extensively by letter. The letters are sent through vacuum tubes to each house, like we have at the bank. I have always been fascinated by those tubes. When I was in the hospital a few weeks ago, I saw that they used them to send records from one floor to the other.