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.

We humans speak an amazing variety of languages—some of them truly extraordinary compared to our own—but this wonderful plenitude is rapidly disappearing. I wondered what it would be like for one of the last speakers of an onomatopoeia-like language. I imagine that such a terribly lonely speaker would want to preserve it, pass it on, teach it to others.

I always planned to tell a story where we meet Harry’s family … and see Harry in her role as Princess Maud. This was it. A story where Harry is balancing her two personae also makes a good fulcrum between what I see as two halves of the series—the early adventures where Harry and Marlowe begin their relationship and we learn about Aetherian technology, and the later stories, where the two will travel all over the world.

One of the things that I think comes up a lot in discussions around representation in fiction—both in terms of characters and authors—is the idea that groups of people are rendered voiceless, that they simply aren’t heard and space is not made for them to speak when they do. Losing one’s voice feels like an especially vicious form of oppression.

Sure—you could use direct neural marketing to sell sports cars. But in a lot of ways it’s actually creepier and more interesting when it’s so pervasive that it’s being used to sell something as commonplace as a bottle of water.

I didn’t have any idea where I was going. There was just something about a girl with feathers for hair. I kept writing about her as “the girl with feathered hair” until I realized what that actually meant.

I’m an electrical engineer, and I occasionally work building hardware for neuroscience labs, … One day a co-worker and I were having a conversation about what we were jokingly referring to as “brain DJs,” the idea being that you’d take, say, EEG recordings of somebody who was in a deep meditative state (or tripping, or whatever), and then induce somebody else to match their “brain waves” using magnetic stimulation (or flashing lights, or whatever).

Every person may experience many changes in one’s life. You are willing to change yet still you may feel a bit uneasy about what may come after the change. Personally speaking, as a young writer who felt a bit bored about my old way of writing, I wanted to try something new and I was not afraid at that moment. But a good story should be the story of everyone, a story which could touch everyone. So I needed to reveal the other half of humanity: the other half that is afraid of what lies ahead.