A lot of my stories have vague beginnings, making it hard to say specifically what inspired them, but “Codename: Delphi” is an exception—it was directly inspired by my novel THE RED: FIRST LIGHT. Delphi is an important character in that novel, but because TR:FL is told in first person from the point of view of a soldier in the field, we never have a chance to get inside Delphi’s head to experience war as she experiences it. So writing the short story gave me a chance to remedy that.

A few years back, I was poaching an egg and found myself staring into the pot and got a little lost. I made a note about the experience and then promptly forgot about it. Last summer, I spent some time writing in a cabin in the White Mountains, and I rediscovered that file on my computer. The story poured out of me after that.

I think that many of our great creators are fueled by hubris. For the people who come up with something truly revolutionary (those who are first with an idea that no one has had before), having the innate idea that you are special, unique, smarter than the average bear allows them to look beyond the accepted boundaries and limitations of what is possible. In “Complex God,” Petra has no doubt that she’s on another level.

Your dreams are the lunatic weeping of some caged madman in a sideshow where the audience is as bestial as the attractions they gawp at. What emptiness brought you to this?

It’s a universe I’ve been writing about for twenty years: a far-future, galactic civilization. The thing most of its inhabitants don’t know is that every few thousand years, the universe arbitrarily shifts its fundamental operating principle between rationalism and magic. And one of those changes is just about to happen.

I was on a panel about generation starships and people kept talking about how small they could make them, the minimum number of people you could have and keep genetic diversity and have enough people to work the ship. And I said “But what if they didn’t all want to do their jobs, after the first generation?” and Alison Sinclair said “What if they don’t want to be engineers, what if they want to be ballet dancers?”

I think what keeps the game of collaboration going (for me, anyway) is that it could change at any moment. At some point, Michael would yell, “Okay! We’re done! Don’t you do another thing! I’ll write the ending!” And then he’d finish it and send it back to me with the warning, “Don’t you change anything!” And I would change something.

There are several layers of deception in the story: The father hides the truth of his illness from the daughter; the state falsifies and tampers with history; and finally, the daughter, taught by everything around her, begins to view the world through a distorted lens, following unspoken rules. This is, of course, like the reality of today’s China.

I started thinking about exactly how to write a speculative story set in the 1920s, as that was the theme of this anthology. Naturally, I started thinking about aspects of the era I’ve researched before and just generally liked, and that made me gravitate toward the P.G. Wodehouse stories about Bertie and Jeeves and the other foppish, empty-headed aristos boozing it up and causing havoc.

Well, basically, I was looking at the creation of lack, the creation of need. In a consumer society like ours, a sense of lack is extremely important, because need feeds consumption. The more people believe they need, the easier it is to control them. So in the story, I tried to expose that by imagining a society in which children’s parents are taken away and replaced.