I’ve written a mystery series set in the Old West — the Holmes on the Range novels — so I’ve done a ton of research into cowboy life and slang. One of the things I enjoyed most about writing the Holmes on the Range books was the chance to throw around a lot of colorful words and turns of phrase, so I did that in “The Herd,” too.

I was living in rural Virginia, where the fragments of slavery and interracial breeding were still swirling around — one of the people I knew was a guy whose male ancestor was either R.J. or Hardin Reynolds — [of the] Reynolds Tobacco family. We saw what had happened, but didn’t always understand why things had happened. The Reynolds family sold a slave, apparently because the other slaves hated him, and bought a piano with the money. I don’t know if that’s a true narrative or not …

I was in my first year of the MFA program at University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and needed to turn something in to workshop for the first time. Someone I knew had told me the story about how as a teenager, they had masturbated into Kleenex, and then had the problem of their dog wanting to eat the Kleenex. I also wanted to write about a mother with a wooden leg, and a surplus of dogs. I liked the idea of an awkward dinner.

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.”