Earth can recover from anything we do to her, even if it takes entire geological epochs. The chemical processes that resolve as life will continue to churn, and eventually, maybe long after we’re all gone, a fresh diverse web of life will emerge, and it will be one wholly alien to what we see when we look out our window. It’s only the current tenants, including the many who have done nothing on the scale of our own destruction, who are royally screwed.

During the drafting process it became clear that personal agency was something I wanted to explore. The women of “Waterbirds” are its focus, of course—when Celia gets to choose how she presents herself to the world, or Irene breaks away from a difficult situation, I hope readers will see how these experiences are relevant to them as women. But the characters—and therefore we—struggle against social and cultural constraints as well.

I like the idea of steampunk and I enjoy it especially when it’s set against the backdrop of our world, if only an alternate version. I have a problem, though. As a black male, the 1800s is not an American era I like to revisit or even re-envision . . . I find it incredibly difficult to overlay steampunk technology on a society gearing up to fight a civil war over the right to enslave my ancestors. And I find steampunking London to be a well saturated undertaking.

John Hunter was a medical revolutionary during perhaps the most wretchedly disgusting period in all of Western medical history: England in the 1700-1800s. At a time when most physicians treated the symptoms of a disease without trying to comprehend the cause, Hunter was a dogged experimentalist who was absolutely intent on understanding the inner workings of the human body. And in order to study the human body, Hunter needed—human bodies.

I actually find setting pretty difficult, even though it’s one of my favorite aspects of a story when done well. Usually I think of myself as a more character-oriented writer. But I love writing about physicality, especially the small details like how one character eats versus another, or the sensation of leaving gravity. In this piece, I was making a conscious effort to pay attention to specificity, because this character has very little past or future. She’s entirely invested in the present moment.

I love that so much contemporary SF is bringing #ownvoices narratives to the surface. My attempt is to do that while directly confronting current events, politics, social justice, in provocative narratives that interrogate the foundations of SF, dismantle and demolish them, then recycle the debris to build a new house where a new kind of SF can live, thrive, and grow. It’s a work in progress.

Merc already had a very specific idea of where the story should go, and most of a draft, when they recruited me. They had wanted to write the story on their own, but they needed the climax to revolve around poetry, and they didn’t feel their poetic chops were up to the task. So they asked me for help, as someone who they knew well and who understood the Principality Suns ’verse, and who had a few more poetry publication credits under their belt.

 I believe that the more science finds answers, the more there will be a craving for myth and magic. Why? Because myth and magic speak to that indefinable something in the human soul that needs to believe rules can be broken. Tatter is definitely a trickster figure. That said, I think of her as on the benign side of the line. She’s more a Spider or Coyote than a Mephistopheles. She lacks the selfishness of Hare. Tatter wants to understand what it is to be human.

 I’m drawn toward the idea of simultaneous truths. I like stories that can be interpreted as both magic and not-magic. We interpret our world through an ambiguous mess of the things we can see and the things we can’t see. The things that we can’t see are the hardest to prove, but often the most important. I wanted the ending to reflect the ambiguity of our reality, in which the mundane and the wondrous coexist.

the influences on this piece come more from poetry and theater than from fiction. A poem can be a gut-punch precisely because its focus is so sharp and limited, while its language is wide-ranging and allusive. But formally, the story is not a poem; it’s a dramatic monologue, a kind of soliloquy. Both of these are very old forms of literature indeed—and yet, they are perfectly suited to the relatively new experience of reading online.