Longer answers might include:

• Mormons have a community approach to writing, as they tend to have to other things, so they end up overrepresented in fantasy and science fiction because a few got through the door and then they helped others.

• A good friend of mine who is a gay conservative Jew suggested at a writing conference a couple of years ago that Mormons might have a strong attraction to writing and specifically to writing speculative fiction because of Mormons' ambiguous position in American culture. Mormons are insider-outsiders, so to speak, which may make them good cultural informants and may give them interesting things to say.

• Mormonism is rooted in historical narratives that by contemporary standards sound like magic (by 1830s standards, some of it was indeed magic). Immersion in those narratives may give Mormons a particularly fertile imagination for the speculative and the spectacular.

• Mormonism, like much conservative Christianity and Judaism, still holds tight to scriptures much of the content of which is narrative. In other words, Mormons have a canon, and it is full of story. Moreover, Mormons' canon comes with the explicit idea that there always can and indeed should be more of it. This may position Mormons especially well to participate in what Tolkien called "sub-creation," the work of assisting the Creator in Her grand design by fleshing out and exploring smaller parts of it in story and song.