So far so good: like any good story, it evokes a place, a situation. Specifically, I'm in somebody's head as he remembers how something started: how the thing, whatever it was, started with the phone ringing while he, whoever he is, was in bed, and how it was a wrong number.

About the period, the sentence tells me only that the action takes place sometime since the advent of the telephone. The thirties. The fifties. The eighties. The present. Prior to 9/11, I would simply have absorbed what I could from it, and continued reading,

But I know something else, something that five years ago wouldn't have seemed so important: when the story was written.

I know it is pre-9/11 — from modern times, but before the attack. I also know from the title that the story's going to take place in New York. Hence its fictional New Yorkers will not have experienced the defining New York moment that was 9/11. They'll inhabit a version of the city that no longer exists. Still "modern times," but no longer the same times today's reader is living. 9/11 hadn't informed the author's imagination. In this book, it will not have happened.

Today, and maybe until I die, I will be approaching any book — and even a pre-9/11 movie or TV series, if I'm not familiar with it — not simply as a modern story about a familiar world or city. Rather, I will be approaching it in the shadow, or in the light, of a great divide. I will have to know: was the story imagined and birthed prior to the attack? Or does it have that smoke in the lungs, that soot on the face, that shock hardened into the bones of the 9/11 survivor?

Of course this won't apply to older stories, those set in a time that from the vantage point of September 10, 2001, already felt like another era. If I revisit a classic — Herman Melville, Humphrey Bogart — or check out some Nabokov or Billy Wilder I've missed, then no sweat.

But if it's from the world that I myself knew prior to 9/11, my interest may be just a little bit less. In fact, I might feel like turning to my friend and bandmate Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who edits science fiction and fantasy, and ask "What have you got that's good lately?"

Ahhh. Faeries.