when I decided I wanted to do a story centering around a phoenix, I started to patch a lot of different phoenix myths together. But my favourite is the most common one. The medieval phoenix, resembling a predatory bird, that dies and is reborn again from its ashes. I guess I’ve Harry Potter to thank for that.

I started “Morning Child,” then an untitled fragment, about ten years before I finished it. I wrote a few pages, then lost steam on the story and put it away in a file drawer. Ten years later, I was going through old files, happened to pick up the fragment and looked at it, and suddenly saw how I could finish it. A couple of days later, I had.

“State Change” was written back when I was a published finalist with the Writers of the Future Contest. For the workshop with Tim Powers and K.D. Wentworth, we had to write a complete short story in twenty-four hours, and Tim started by walking around the room, designating random objects as prompts for each of us. When Tim stopped by my seat, he saw a half-finished glass of soda and the melting ice cubes inside, and so he picked one out and told me that was my story.

I actually set out to write a cyberpunk story, when I sat down to write this. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I set out to write a story that would appeal to the sensibilities of a friend, who happens to enjoy cyberpunk stories, among other things.

All writing comes from a point of view; even an essay has a character behind the narrative, who shares the author’s name and some of her or his characteristics. Someone was watching this woman play piano. But not me. Someone who noticed and described it differently than I would.

Sending Harry and Marlowe to my neck of the woods offered a great way to introduce “weird west” type stories and milieus to their world, and to see what Aetherian technology is doing in other places. Additionally, adventures in the “exotic” American west were a staple of Victorian adventure stories—see the Sherlock Holmes story “A Study in Scarlet,” for an example. I wanted to play with that trope.

You wouldn’t want me in charge of designing the real world. I had an odd upbringing and my standards don’t fit the middle of the bell curve. In Kaslo’s world, I am the designer, and because I am a character-focused writer, what I want is for him to come through in the end. Probably not unscathed, but still punching.

My first story, “Lunchbox”, Analog, May ’72, was accepted my fourth day in the US Army (a draftee) in October 1970. I got to enjoy the sale about four minutes after mail call ’til I had to go back to doing pushups. I realized, the eighteen months I was in the Army, that if there was an East Coast Monster Emergency, I would be one of the guys sent out to stop the Rhodosaurus (or whatever).

The idea came to me many years ago, after rereading one of my favorite stories, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” by Jorge Luis Borges. The Borges story is about a secret society that creates the encyclopedia of an imaginary world, Tlön. Eventually, items from that world begin appearing in ours. Archaeologists start finding artifacts from Tlön. The story is about how imagination creates reality.

Stories let us simplify an issue so that we can see the essence of it. Science fiction lets us get closer to actual struggle by letting us find new contexts for telling stories so we can see them from new angles.