Science fiction allows us to imagine both the best and worst of humanity. When we open our stories up to the realm of the fantastic, we bring a new creativity and freshness to the question of how to survive this twisted, complicated world with our souls intact. As a genre, science fiction hasn’t always been welcoming to different cultures and their answers to this question.

Sometimes ideas bubble and percolate through unknown passageways in my mind for many years before they finally find expression in a story, but in the case of “Eternal Horizon,” everything developed very quickly indeed. I was walking along a remote beach and looking out to sea and a submerged sandbank halfway to the horizon made a line of surf that looked like another horizon nearer to shore. On the way back home all the elements came together from this single observation.

“We Are the Cloud” extrapolates from the very real and interconnected systems of exploitation that I was seeing up close through my work with homeless people. The people I met at soup kitchens had aged out of foster care; the moms I met in shelters had lost kids to the foster care system. The boys I saw hanging out in Morningside Park in Harlem were the ones who got arrested and fed into the prison system by cops looking to fill their quotas;

I like a good (i.e., unanachronistic) historical, like Patrick O’Brien’s masterful Aubrey/Maturin tales, and I read a lot of crime fiction. People who are familiar with my work will know that I’m actually a crime writer trapped in a science-fiction author’s career.

The story actually started with the rules. I’d been reading a lot of Karin Lowachee and Lois McMaster Bujold and I wanted to experiment with writing science fiction of the sort I’ve read a bunch of, but never written. As I was thinking through the story I wanted to tell, I thought of a few of the rules and wondered if I could play with them as structural markers.

I was doing some work for my Obsidian and Blood trilogy, and I had this very vivid image of a gunslinger coming to a mine—except I couldn’t really fit it anywhere into my novels. So I took the image, added the research I’d done into Aztec customs, and more or less made up the universe on the spot, throwing in a few references to not-quite-steampunk-y things (the god-machine is actually more a reference to Asimov’s positronic machines in his short stories, who end up ruling the world).

“Why You Want a Physicist to Speak at Your Funeral” [a eulogy written by NPR commentator Aaron Freeman] resonated with me. It haunted me from the moment I read it. Then I watched a documentary about supernovae. In 1604, there was one so brilliant it lasted for months in the daytime sky. Johannes Kepler tracked it for over a year, and wrote his observations—which is why most people call SN 1604 “Kepler’s Supernova.”

I love giving voice to characters who aren’t typically seen in SF, or fiction in general. That’s part of the beauty of all the projects in the last few years like LONG HIDDEN and FIERCE FAMILY and Women Destroy Science Fiction!: They show that these characters and these stories are wanted and needed. Characters and relationships that reflect the diversity and complexity of real people, even if they’re in fictional settings.

I am very focused on mortality in my fiction. My first novel, The Between, was about a man who escaped death and had to face the consequences as death chased him. My African Immortals series that began with MY SOUL TO KEEP is about people who never age or die. I have been very aware of death since I was a child, and living with that awareness has been an important part of my life and growth.

The very first spark that turned into Quentin’s gift came, like so many good things, from Twitter. I believe it was the excellent writer Elizabeth Bear whose biography used to read, “I tell lies to people for money.” And it’s such a great description of part of the writer’s job (the other part, of course, being that we tell truths to people for money) that it stuck in my head, and made my want to do something with it.