Go suggested itself at first because, unlike chess, modern day computers don’t play it very well. (I should point out here that I play even worse.) This is, in part, because Go has a huge state space. To me, plays in Go can feel rather subtle. Placing a stone off by a point can have drastic ramifications. A fight on one side of the board may affect the situation on the other side of the board. There’s a lot to keep track of.

Since I was quite young, I have had this sense that the fourth-dimensional universe we inhabit is a kind of conjuror’s trick, especially the part about sequential time. If we could see reality as it is, rather than how we’re merely wired to experience it, we’d say, “Oh, well, of course.” Back when I used to take LSD, that sense was reinforced, because I got to see mundane objects in all their actual splendor. The feeling has stuck with me for almost fifty years now.

It’s so odd to sit here, remembering my half-self writing characters like Kris and Max, who seemed impossibly ancient then but now feel like contemporaries. It’s more depressing to see how many of the themes of this story are still current: the consequences of environmental degradation and war, patriarchy and the violent means it pursues to retain power, the costs of survival . . . I guess it’s the last that has stuck with me down the years, from the older Hogarth’s perspective.

I believe that speculative fiction is not only about ideas or about technology, but is how society and people interact with ideas and with technology. Advancements in science change us, movements in society change and transform existing structures, conflict arises from these changes; how do we deal with these things? Do we become tougher? Do we become harder? How do we continue to hold fast to human connections in a world that dehumanizes so many of us?

My best friend lives in the Pacific Northwest, and all logical projections of sea level increase and weather pattern changes highlight it as one of the areas where things will remain very much the same — which is why they’re likely to get flooded by those of us not lucky enough to already live there. I much prefer Northern California, but we’re already toast.

“A face like an imperfectly shaven tennis ball”: Many years ago a friend of mine sent me a link to something called “The Surrealist Compliment Generator” and that was one of the compliments. It stuck with me and eventually, somehow, in that sideways way the brain works, it managed to turn itself into a story about a girl whose body disassembled itself once a month.

Looking at loosely realistic projections of what might happen if the moon exploded, I realized it was possible for the weather and oceans to be very volatile. The American South seemed like it would be a dangerous, but potentially still better-than-other-places location to live. And I liked the Mississippi river, since it is such a main artery for the USA. I could picture new settlements and old surviving cities returning to using shipping to get people and goods moved around.

My parents were divorced when I was very young, and for a long time, I considered that rift in our family the central crisis of my life. I was fascinated with the process of falling in love and getting married and starting a family. I imagine lots of people are, and that’s why romance novels are so popular. I didn’t really believe in romantic love the way it was presented in stories. I spent a lot of time wondering if an arranged marriage (sort of epitomized by Beauty and the Beast) was better than marrying for love.

We need more inclusiveness and representation in genre fiction as an accurate reflection of our world, not just as it is now, but the way it’s been and the way it’s going to be. Fighting against inclusiveness not only puts you on the wrong side of history, it also puts you on the wrong side of wrong.

I was thinking a lot about totalitarian states, and how insidiously they turn people against one another, making them complicit with great evil. Obviously, the Nazis and such states were in my mind; among many other things, the pit is a concentration camp. But I was thinking about the war on terror, as well — especially the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.