I do try to separate my personal activism—showing up at a demonstration or something—from what I write. I don’t write tracts, I write novels. I’m not a preacher, I’m a fiction writer. I get a lot of moral guidance from reading novels, so I guess I expect my novels to offer some moral guidance, but they’re not blueprints for action, ever.

If ETs want to contact new tech races, they’re not likely to waste time and resources on gigantic beacons. They’ll know the thousand—or ten thousand, or fifty thousand—life worlds around them that have oxygen atmospheres. But the odds that any one of those has a shiny new civilization will be very small, at any one time. So they’ll just send a ping to each of them, once every hundred years—or maybe once a year—saying, “Is there anybody there yet?” Because that’s cheap to do.

We have some of the best writers in science fiction and fantasy today that we’ve ever had in the genre. That said, one of the things is that when you have people who are really engaged on the literary side of writing, as many of our current really excellent writers are, there is a question of how approachable it is to someone who is just coming fresh into the field.

In order to come up with the Kellis-Amberlee virus, I read enough books on viruses to qualify for some kind of horrible extra credit program, audited a bunch of courses at UC Berkeley and at the California Academy of Sciences, and then started phoning the CDC persistently and asking them horrible questions.

The two things I postulated that I think make [my new novel] workable as a realistic kind of fantasia are space elevators on Earth and self-replicating machinery, and these are two supposedly possible engineering feats that are discussed in the literature, so they’re not physically impossible. They might be hard engineering feats, but it seems like they could be done, and there are even companies working on at least the space elevator.

The idea of Mister Fitz, who’s a puppet who is also a sorcerer, I’m sure comes from the fact that my mother made papier-mâché puppets when I was a child, and in particular one year she made puppets of all the Moomintroll characters, and put on a show of Moominland Midwinter for me for my birthday party.

Because there isn’t just one flavor of parallel universe—there’s a version that comes out of quantum mechanics, there’s a version that comes out of cosmology, a version that comes out of string theory, and so forth. But one thing that they do share is it’s pretty tough, if not impossible, to go from one universe to another in any of these versions—in any conventional notion of what it would mean to travel from one universe to another.

There [has] to be a seductive side to the power, of feeling yourself gain strength, and your muscles get stronger and your limbs get longer and your whole body becomes invulnerable with a soft wonderful coat of hair. And you get fangs and you get claws and you are able to really destroy your enemies without much thought. And I thought, “That’s got to be seductive. That’s got to be great.”

Comic books succeed—and have succeeded for decades—because of fans, because of people who love them. Big, giant Hollywood genre movies succeed because of fans. Video games have become more popular over the years because of fans. So for me this is a film that was very much rooted in those people—in their passions, in their desire, their obsessions.

[Science fiction and fantasy] were the kind of books that I loved to read, so at any given moment in my life from the point that I decided to be a writer forward, which was around this time—I discovered Burroughs and then Arthur Conan Doyle right around the same time, and those were kind of my first two crushes—I would imagine writing books that I loved to read.