The Genesis of City of Fire by Laurence Yep

By Susan Chang, Senior Editor

As an editor, one of the things I love to do is come up with ideas for books I’d like to read and find the perfect person to write the story. These ideas come from anywhere and everywhere: TV, magazines, web surfing, video games, comic books. One day, I was sitting at home watching an episode of National Geographic Explorer. Called “China’s Secret Mummies,” it was about ancient mummies unearthed in the Tarim Basin in Western China in 1978.

Surprisingly, these mummies had Caucasian facial features and light hair. Who were these people? What were they doing there?

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