I have long used as a story generation tool the personal premise of “secret sequels,” tales that take place in the worlds of various stories by others, all important to me, but not belonging to me. I use the original as jumping-off point, then file off the serial numbers, secure that what I’ve brought to the canvas is sufficient to justify the tale as entirely mine, without being slavish carbon copy. It is a function of asking the question, “What would happen next?”

I love fiction that explores spatial, dimensional, and time travel. However, each has a different effect on a story. They explore different themes. Teleportation worked for these characters and this story because it is fleeting, over in an instant. Often writers will use it as a superpower, or an answer to long-distance travel, or to explore philosophical questions about who actually shows up on the other end, but I was more interested in the fleeting moment itself.

This is really the first Harry and Marlowe story that’s tackled colonialism head-on, and I hope I did the topic some justice. Really, I could only write Victorian-inspired adventure stories for so long without addressing colonialism. Many commentators have noted that steampunk offers a chance to deconstruct and subvert many of the received tropes of Victorian adventure stories.

The thing that seeded this story was a moment in Brent Watanabe’s San Andreas Deer Cam, which hacked a version of Grand Theft Auto to make the POV character a deer. I watched it for two hours straight the first time I saw it; when it walked into the ocean and I realized that I was trying to determine the exact moment it had died, I got unsettled enough to close the window. I never shook that experience and that image, though.

I’m a scientific pantheist. Science is awesome—literally. It inspires awe in me, much the way that I suspect many people are inspired by more traditional religious teachings. So for me, it only makes sense to craft the stories our ancestors might have, had they known more about the universe we live in.

I have no carpentry training, although I have used a saw, hatchet, axe, and hammer back in the day. I had already done research on architecture (it’s a thing of mine), and for the second two Spiritwalker books I researched early nineteenth-century woodworking techniques and tools because they were important for the story. So I used that research as well as some very handy YouTube videos to decide on what details I could reasonably highlight.

The idea for the story came when my wife and I—before we were married—got a dog together, our first dog together, and he was a rescue and a freakazoid when we first got him, and how strange it was suddenly sharing a house with another sentient creature that seemed to take up its own space but also seemed to be constantly watching us, observing us, judging us—he wasn’t, but it felt like he was—and so that is where the strange sense of benign paranoia came out.

Before I knew Jeri’s background, I knew she wasn’t someone who felt at home in space. She found it dark, and deeply lonely. She was the sort of person who, if she wasn’t part of a crew, would come to personally need Cleo, even more than other pilots might. On the other hand, I knew she was someone who chose a life in space, so it couldn’t be completely intolerable for her.

I think Wild Bill represents a very specific kind of harmful, destructive masculinity—one that’s got a very hard surface, but an interior that’s mostly made up of weakness and insecurity. He’s constantly putting pressure on himself, very tired and very alone, and that gives him a strong desire to connect with someone while feeling he shouldn’t. I think this kind of masculinity is damaging both inside and outside.