Accepting the Phoenix Award for Keeper twenty years later, Hughes discussed her writing process in general and specifically for that work. The theme she set out to explore was loneliness. Would one human being living alone from a very young age truly feel lonely? That theme had been inspired by an Edmonton Journal description of the boy in the bubble: "David is a three-year-old who has never known a mother's kiss or the touch of a bare human hand. He lives in a plastic bubble ..." (1 October 1974). Only after five years, she saw how to ask "Are you lonely?" in a science fiction story.
Hughes believed that she learned the answer in the course of writing and expressed it "in the last few words of the book when Olwen realizes that after her death Guardian will be alone. He says,“You must not be distressed. After all, I am no human. DaCops do not have the capacity to be lonely.” Olwen watches him leave the room and whispers, “Poor Guardian.” For Guardian is not human. I felt I had made the necessary statement. I knew, by the last line, what the book was about. Pain,including the pain of loneliness, is an essential part of the human condition."
Only after a school visit to talk about the book with third-grade children (ages about 8–9), when a girl explained "how bad she felt about the attitude of the colonists to Olwen’s physical appearance" —only then the author saw the theme, "prejudice and the damage it can cause, not only to the recipient, but also to the instigator."
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