I think a lot about cycles of time and arrows of time, two dominant models of time that have been important not just in the history of philosophy and science, but also in how we consider and come to terms with our own mortality. It is sometimes said that taking the long view is depressing—since in the long term, all of us will be dead. But for this story, I wanted to see if it’s possible to go the other way.

I read a little bit of Angela Carter and Lyudmila Petrushevskaya while working on “Al-Kahf,” The Bloody Chamber and There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby, so many of the structural and stylistic decisions I made in my own story were influenced by those authors. I’m a fan of Carter’s detail. Her writing is rich and dense, and I adore her attention to language.

Take memories, for instance. They’re imperfect and fleeting, and yet we build so much of our sense of self upon them. “I am the person today who remembers the person I was yesterday.” So if you forget a particular event, are you a different person than the one who experienced it? You almost certainly remember it differently than it actually happened. Our brains are incredible at filling in details to make our memories more believable.

Kali was actually created out of body parts of different Hindu gods. They were unable to defeat a powerful demon themselves, so they each contributed a body part, which came with that god’s greatest power or weapon, and created Kali. But they hadn’t anticipated how powerful she would be now that she had all their powers (duh). She was a wrecking ball. An unstoppable force of destruction.

In our society, we valorize dissent. We’re literally taught in school that if one man refuses to knuckle under, then the entire world can change. That’s also a key element of so many fantasy stories. But it’s just not true. Oftentimes, you lose. The problem is, you don’t know what’s going to happen. You don’t know if you’ll win or lose. You don’t know what courage is. So it’s impossible to know, ahead of time, what’s the right thing to do.

I’m a psycholinguist who’s also a first language speaker of a language (Hungarian) that often defies received wisdom about “language universals.” A lot of “facts which are true of all languages” simply do not hold for Hungarian. I am less of an expert about emotions, but my knowledge of languages has in general made me skeptical of claims of cognitive universals. All the research that I mention in the story is real.

Growing up in Malaysia, really, and listening to the usual doctrine. The wife is an asset, an advantageous acquisition for the husband’s family. She has to be. Because otherwise, what’s the point of her? There’s definitely a growing awareness of women’s rights in the country, but a lot of the older generation still subscribe to the idea that women are almost property. And you do see its impact on men of my generation

 I’m fascinated by stage magic. There’s definitely a similarity between stage magic and fiction, not just in the reliance on the audience to suspend disbelief, but also in the power of misdirection. Writers choose what readers see, and when they see it. What’s background or set, what detail will be important to the story? We control the timing of what is revealed when, and if we do it right, we reward the careful reader. Style is just one of the tools.

 Humans can obviously be connected to the environment and/or incredibly destructive towards it. But even if humans stop existing, if we wipe ourselves out, are driven to extinction, or just up stakes and leave, the environment will go on. It doesn’t need us nearly as much as we need it. I wrote this story in response to my own fears of nuclear war, which are a primal thing for me. I grew up in the 1980s when the possibility of a nuclear exchange with the USSR was still quite real, so that has lurked in my own psyche for many, many years.

I definitely didn’t want to write anything tragic. I think in our world we always know that tragedy is right around the corner and always a possibility, and so it looms over Jamie like it looms over us all. But there are enough tragedies about transgender kids and adults, both in fiction and in reality. This didn’t need to be another one.