Once every generation or so, it snows in South Australia. Specifically, a very small number of flakes fall on the highest points of the Adelaide Hills, which aren't really that high, and evaporate almost immediately. I've never witnessed this phenomenon; few have, I'd imagine, except in newspapers or on the news. The notion of snow is therefore an alien one to someone born or bred in these parts.

"White Christmas" was written at the end of 1992, in the middle of summer. It was my 59th short story, sandwiched between a novella that later became Geodesica: Ascent and a small piece that has never seen the light of day. It was picked up by Eidolon and published (with a very fast turn-around) in early 1993, and for a while was my most reprinted story. It was the first short story by an Australian to appear in America's Aboriginal SF, was revised for teenage readers in Lucy Sussex's YA collection Altered Voices, and managed to pick up not one but two honourable mentions in Gardner Dozois's Year's Best SF, four years apart, plus another in the Datlow and Windling Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. I am very pleased to own Shaun Tan's original artwork for the story, and it still sends chills down my spine when I stop to look at it.

Reading over the story now, I am reminded of the events in my life that led to its genesis. I'd taken a trip north some years earlier, away from the city lights, to spot the faint smudge that was Halley's Comet. My maternal grandfather remembered seeing it when he was a child, and described it as a great, glowing streak across the sky. I was disappointed not to share that experience, but was, deep down, partly relieved. Astronomical events like comets and solar eclipses provoke intense anxiety in the parts of us that aren't yet entirely civilised. Coupling that innate fear with one provoked by the then novel field of nanotechnology seemed logical to me. The looming millennium just made it even more appropriate.

I'm a big fan of Wells' The War of the Worlds, which is referenced in the story. The Red Weed was an obvious inspiration for the deadly snow that snuffs out humanity in one fell fall. For some time, I pondered a sequel called "The View from Mayberry Hill", about a journalist aboard an Antarctic re-supply mission who has to cope with a very different sort of freezing of the oceans, but the millennium has passed without too much trauma, comets have been and gone, and I've moved on to other things. However, I do still hope to catch one of those magical moments when the Adelaide Hills turns white and the world is, just for a moment, tipped upside down. Magical and terrifying, like life is supposed to be.

  — Sean Williams, November 2006