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.

I don’t believe in predestination—the idea that everything is already written and planned out and that all we are doing is dancing a set of steps that have already been choreographed. I very much believe that we have the individual freedom to fuck up, and to be full of grace. I also believe that humans are story-telling animals—we like things to make sense

This story is an excerpt from a novel that I’ve been working on for a long time. And Rock’s narrative voice sort of evolved over the course of working on the book. I wanted a really energetic, reckless, crazypants persona, so that you could imagine this character being willing to pilot a flaming exercise bike off a tool shed without a second thought.

I think this illustrates a larger point which comes up in my fiction from time to time: Technology, by itself, does not have a moral stance; it simply magnifies the power of humans to accomplish what they want to do. I’m generally skeptical about “progress” as a pure positive for that reason.

I’ve had an off-and-on fascination with Sandburg’s cycle of designedly American fairy tales for years. They occupy such a strange and interesting literary space—part fable, part poetry, silly and curiously affecting at once. Fragments of phrases from the Rootabaga Stories are permanently lodged in my head.